Irene and the Witch Read online

  Andras’s stone. It represented his regrets, and he had given it to her as a keepsake, a symbolic casting off his burdens and shame because of her, because of her influence on him.

  She clutched it in her hand, closing her fingers around it and holding it tight.

  Andras.

  How far away he seemed now. Her heart ached as she thought of his slow smile and gruff voice. Her one consolation was that he was not here, suffering the same fate. She’d been sad when she’d realized he wouldn’t be able to return to the land of the living with her, but now she was glad of it. It would keep him safe.

  Sanit spoke softly to Ukrit who still sobbed, Sanit’s voice low and soothing, and Irene let the sound flow over her, relaxing and comforting her. After a bit, Ukrit’s crying stopped.

  She lay on her side, half awake, half asleep for a long time. She might even have slept a little; she wasn’t sure. Finally, the pain and horror receded enough that she was able to think clearly. She closed her eyes and focused on soothing her charred skin, using the last of her strength to return both it and her clothes to pristine condition. After a few moments of strained concentration, she managed to adjust her outward appearance, though the pain remained. She struggled back up to a sitting position, still tightly clutching Andras’s stone in her fist.

  Boonsri, in her usual meditative pose, opened one eye and glanced at Irene. “You are an idiot,” she said.

  “Why? Because I won’t work for her?”

  “Because you plant yourself like a tree in her path. You think this is strength, but she will simply cut you down and move on.”

  “I’m sorry, maybe I missed something, but how is sitting here passively aggressively meditating instead of helping her not the same thing as what I’m doing?”

  Boonsri opened her other eye. “She has never asked me to serve her. Believe me, if she had, I would have jumped at the opportunity.”

  Disgusted, Irene shook her head. “Wow. So you’d go out and lure other ghosts into this trap to save your own skin? That’s just... I don’t even have words.”

  Boonsri looked away, very deliberately closing her eyes and resuming her meditative pose.

  Sanit gently cleared his throat. “It requires a great deal of focus to hold one’s self together after a certain point.”

  Irene glanced at Boonsri. She thought of the dozens of cuts criss-crossing the young woman’s arms. Instantly, she felt like shit. That’s why Boonsri spent all her time meditating—she was using every inch of willpower she possessed to hold herself together, so she didn’t end up like Hathai. Boonsri would jump at the chance to serve—and be punished with flames for failure—because it was better than the alternative. She was almost out of time; soon, she’d be worse than dead—she’d be a formless and mindless Ugly.

  “I’m sorry...” Irene said, though the words seemed so small and ineffectual. Boonsri’s expression and pose didn’t change. “Shit,” Irene said, slumping in dejection. She turned back to Sanit. “There has to be a way out of here. You guys have been here a while, surely there must be something we can try?”

  Boonsri opened her eyes and looked at Sanit. The two locked eyes. Boonsri glanced at Irene and then back at the old man, then nodded.

  “What?” said Irene, looking from one to the other. “What’s going on.”

  “There may be a way,” said Sanit. “But it would depend on you.”

  “Okay...” Irene said hesitantly, not really sure what that meant.

  “Can we trust you?” Sanit asked.

  “Of course!” Irene said. “Look, my ass is on the line here, too, and I would like very much to get out of here.”

  Sanit rose to a standing crouch. He stared at the bars for a moment and then, to Irene’s disbelief, he stepped forward, through the bars, and into the room.

  He straightened up, groaning with relief as he stretched.

  Irene stared him. “How did you do that?” she asked. She tried to jump to her feet and hit her head on the cage. Electrical shocks seared the top of head, causing her to yelp and drop back down to all fours. Grimacing, she rubbed at her head, as she looked at Sanit for an explanation.

  He gave her a placid smile. “With great practice.”

  “If you can get out of your cage, then why haven’t you escaped, or, better yet, killed Zara?”

  “I can leave my cage,” the old man said,” but it does me little good. She has bled me too much. It takes all of my strength just to accomplish that. I’m not strong enough to get out of this room—and I’m definitely not strong enough to fight her. I fear it is not long before I am little better than Hathai.”

  Irene glanced uneasily at the cloud of smoke languidly floating in the corner of Ukrit’s cage.

  The old man was giving Irene a meaningful stare. “But you, you are stronger than any us. You come from the other side, so your spirit is stronger, and she hasn’t bled you much yet. If I were to teach you how to get out of your cage, then you could fight her.”

  Irene stared at him. “And how am I supposed to do that? She’s covered in ghost charms, I can’t touch her.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Take the knife from her. Use your bare hands. Do whatever it takes.”

  Irene had been thinking along the lines of tying Zara up so they could all escape; Sanit was talking about killing Zara. Irene wasn’t sure she could kill someone—especially in cold blood and with her bare hands. Her forehead creased with confusion and dismay. “But... and then what? Killing her will just release her spirit from her body. She’ll be even more dangerous to us when she’s a ghost! Hell, she’ll be able to cross over to the other side, even.”

  “Then we will have to kill her spirit, too.”

  “What? How?”

  The old man shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You are from a higher plane than us; you are already closer to pure essence than we are, and you are stronger than us. You just need to learn how to get out of the cage and then you will be able to stop her.”

  Irene wasn’t so sure about that—this plan seemed to lack a lot of essentials, such as specifics. How was she going to get out of her cage? How was she going to incapacitate Zara—was she even strong enough to overcome the other woman in a straight up fight? Irene had never been in a fist fight in her life. This plan seemed to be predicated on Irene managing the entire thing by the seat of her pants.

  “You just need to stop being an idiot,” said Boonsri. “Don’t let her bleed you anymore. Pretend to help her. Placate her. Let her burn you. Let her bleed us, instead. Just don’t let her steal any more of your essence or you will soon be too weak to fight her, and we’ll all be doomed.”

  Irene shook her head, unable to stomach the idea of letting the others suffer torture to shield her. “I can’t... that...”

  “There is no time to argue,” Sanit said. “This is the only way.”

  “What about Ukrit?” Irene replied. “I can’t sit back when she threatens to torture him... he’s just a child.”

  “He’s older than you,” Boonsri said dryly. “Besides, she will bleed him no matter what. Your intervention only delays the inevitable.”

  Still Irene hesitated. There had to be another way.

  Boonsri twisted to face Irene, her face uncharacteristically earnest, the haughty mask slipping to a look of pleading. “Please,” she said. “I beg of you... do not let me die here...”

  “I’ll going to help, that’s not a question, but...”

  Boonsri shuddered for a moment, and it seemed to Irene her features and beautiful red dress and regal headdress all disappeared into a dim gray fog. Almost in the same instant, the formless cloud shuddered again, resolving back into Boonsri. Boonsri turned away from Irene, immediately resuming her meditative pose.

  Irene’s shoulders drooped in acquiescence. There was no other way. This was the only plan they had—and the others were running out of time. How many times could Boonsri, Ukrit, or Sanit or any of the others stand to be bled before they were too far gone to ever be s
aved?

  Resignedly, she nodded at Sanit. “Okay, fine, teach me.”

  Sanit came closer to her cage and sat down cross-legged on the dirty floor in front of her. “You are a spirit—you are pure energy.”

  Irene nodded. This part she knew.

  “As such, you can travel in the negative space between objects, such as the gap between these bars or even through the door of this hut.”

  Irene’s expression reflected her deep doubt on the veracity of this statement. “Are you saying ghosts can walk through walls? Because that contradicts everything I’ve experienced as a ghost.”

  “Not exactly. You are not walking through solid matter—you are walking through the space between matter.”

  Irene didn’t know what that meant. High school science had been a long time ago, but she was pretty sure matter was solid. She had no idea what Sanit meant by the “space between matter.” The gap between the bars of her cage, she understood. But she wasn’t sure how that applied to the shed door—which was a single, solid object as far as she knew. “Okay, sure, as a being of mostly energy, I could probably squeeze myself through the gap between these bars. I mean I’ve done it before, when I move through cracks between afterlife realms. Technically, I’m squeezing myself through a very narrow opening. But the problem here is that the ghost charms on these bars create a solid barrier. There’s no space for me to squeeze through. Believe me, that was the first thing I checked when Zara trapped me.”

  Sanit shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. There is always space, even if only the width of an atom.”

  Now it was Irene’s turn to shake her head. “I don’t have that kind of control. I can barely move through big cracks, like doorways. I can’t—”

  “Then we will all die.”

  Irene bit back a retort. He was right. She didn’t have a choice; she had to do this. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Show me how to do it.”

  Sanit met her eyes, and he seemed to see her resolve. He smiled gently. “It’s simpler than it seems.”

  Sanit began by filling in the gaps in her knowledge. He confirmed what she already knew about needing to use the same process she used for moving between afterlife realms. However, it turned out, everything she thought she knew about that was wrong. She’d always thought of it as moving like toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube, like she was compressing herself into a long thin shape and pushing herself through a small opening. That was not the case. As Sanit explained it, she’d actually been unconsciously atomizing her ghost body and then reconstituting it once through whatever opening she had passed through. In essence, she’d teleported, and in the time between solid states, when she was in a state of pure energy without conscious thought or form, she’d been non-existent. No wonder everything seemed to go blank whenever she moved between afterlife planes; she ceased to exist in those moments.

  “Now concentrate,” Sanit said. “In the past, you have basically given yourself a running start, turning to pure energy and using momentum to push you through to the other side, and then allowing yourself to pop back into shape. That is all very well as a crude sort of method without much control or refinement. Now, you need to learn how to maintain your thoughts, your intent, when you are energy. You must learn to embrace your spirit form and flow from one shape to another. That way, you can direct your movements when you are pure energy and not rely on momentum.”

  “My way has worked just fine up to now,” Irene muttered.

  Sanit have her a hard look. “And what if you had thrown yourself at one of these cracks with too little force to carry you through to the other side? You would get stuck there, in the nothing, for eternity.”

  Irene shuddered at the thought. Thank God for beginner’s luck. Abashed at the thought of the fate she might have blundered her way into, she acquiesced to the need to embrace her ghost form. Up until now, she’d done everything in her power to fight tooth and nail against being a ghost, hanging onto her physical form with both hands. Now, her life depended on her not only believing, with all her might, that she was nothing more than energy, but also in her discarding her physical form and fully embracing a formless existence.

  Dread washed over her. She wasn’t sure she could do it. Truth be told, she was afraid—afraid of losing herself. If she let herself forget her mortal life, then she risked not ever being able to return to the land of the living—and her dreams of becoming a guardian angel died. Even work, she risked becoming a Hungry Ghost.

  Irene glanced at Boonsri, on her right, and then at Ukrit on her left, who was mimicking Sanit’s pose and apparently trying to follow the lesson himself.

  She had no choice; if she didn’t let go of her physical self once and for all, they were all going to die.

  She took a deep breath, locked eyes with Sanit, and nodded. Then she closed her eyes, relaxed her mind, and sank deeper into herself, letting the physical world fall away.

  I’m not solid. I’m a fluid. I can go anywhere, can slip between any crevice.

  Closing her eyes wasn’t working—she was finding it hard to concentrate while knowing that Sanit was watching her—so she opened her eyes and focused on the bars of the cage.

  Around her, there was a collective silence, as if all the other ghosts were watching her with baited breath. It was a lot of pressure.

  She reached out with her ghost senses, letting her eyes relax until everything went fuzzy as she stared at the ghost repelling charms etched into the bars. She focused on a point halfway between two bars, where she imaged a small crack might be between the force fields put out by the ghost charm on each bar. She concentrated hard, putting all of her will, all of her intention, all of her heart into imagining herself squeezing through that small space. She held that image in her mind’s eye and then closed her eyes, sinking deeper into her ghost senses, blocking out everything in the physical world. The feel of her hair brushing her face and the fabric of her dress touching her legs, the musty smell of the shed, and the rhythmic sound of Boonsri’s breathing all faded away, leaving nothing but her—her sense of self, her sense of existence in a fathomless void, her feeling of completeness.

  “No, no, no!” said Sanit. “You’re doing it wrong.”

  Irene’s eyes popped open. “What do you mean? That’s how I always move through cracks.”

  “That’s the problem. This isn’t a crack. There is nothing to move between here. You have to move through.”

  “What do you mean through?” Hadn’t they just talked about this? Ghosts couldn’t move through physical objects; Sanit had confirmed that fact. Her ghost body had mass and weight; that’s how she was able to pick up things and open doors and the like.

  “Through,” said Sanit impatiently. “You know the meaning of the word, don’t you?”

  Irene glared at him. “Of course I do.”

  “You must...” Sanit groped for words. “Not keep yourself apart from your environment. Just the opposite. You must become a part of it. Let yourself flow into it. Become the bars. Become the air. Become the energy field produced by the ghost repellents.”

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “Yes, yes you do!” Sanit said angrily. “Stop being so stupid.”

  “I’m not doing it on purpose!” Irene retorted. “I—”

  The lock on the exterior of the shed rasped, followed by the sound of the bolt being slid back.

  “Quick!” Irene hissed, “Get back in your cage!”

  Sanit scrambled unsteadily to his feet and managed to slip back into his cage just as Zara threw open the door, letting in a thin yellow light from the setting sun. She strode into the room and went straight for Irene’s cage. “Give me your arm.”

  Irene looked up at Zara and forced a defiant look onto her face—the disgust and loathing were easy enough to conjure; the bravado was a bit harder. “Hello to you, too.”

  “I don’t have time to play around. Give me your arm. Now.”

  Ukrit squeaked with alarm and rushed to the front o
f his cage, thrusting his arm out with a whimper.

  “No!” Irene said to him, shaking her head. She knew it was part of their plan, but this was too much. She wasn’t about to let Zara cut him, let alone feed off of him. Irene was still strong; she’d only been bled once. Better that Zara cut her than him. She thrust her arm through the bars, lifting her chin higher, staring Zara down. To her right, Boonsri hissed angrily.

  Zara looked from Irene to Ukrit and back again. Her lip curled up. She stalked back to the work bench and picked up the silver knife. Irene’s stomach dropped at the sight of it. Her legs shook as she kneeled on the hard ground, but she held her arm steady.

  Zara looked at her and Ukrit and Boonsri in turn, then she crossed to Sanit’s cage. “Give me your arm,” she said.

  Irene started to protest, but Boonsri silenced her with another impatient hiss.

  Wordlessly, Sanit proffered his arm. Zara gripped it with one hand, holding it steady. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been up, old man? You must think me stupid.” She brought down the knife, slashing a four-inch gash in Sanit’s arm. He winced and his arm jerked, but Zara yanked on it, keeping it straight. She dropped the knife and pulled what looked like a turkey baster out of her belt. She held the device to the gash in Sanit’s arm and pumped the bulb on the baster’s end. It wheezed for a moment as it sucked air and then it began to draw Sanit’s blood into the tube.

  Zara pumped and pumped, sucking more and more of Sanit’s essence.

  “Hey,” said Irene. “Hey! Don’t you think you have enough?”

  Sanit’s eyes had rolled back into his head, and he swayed unsteadily and then collapsed sideways on the floor. Zara hung onto his arm, though she sank to her knees outside his cage, never letting up on the suction.

  Sanit’s body shuddered, and it seemed to Irene that Sanit was fading, his features all running together as if he were melting. And then Irene understood—Zara planned to kill him.

  “No!” Irene shouted, grabbing the bars of her cage. She gritted her teeth against the pain, shaking the bars with all her might. “Stop it! Leave him alone!” Around here there were howls of rage and grief from the other ghosts. Ukrit was whimpering, his cries shrill and piercing like an animal in pain.