Vicious Circle

She unfolded her legs and stepped down off the chunk of marble with unconscious grace. I realized that it was the cover of a family vault: Joseph and Caroline Rybandt, and a bunch of subsidiary Rybandts listed in a smaller font. Death is no more democratic than life is. I also realized that Juliet was carrying a gray plastic bowl half-full of water. It had been resting in her lap, and when I first saw her she must have been peering down into it.

“So how’s tricks?” I asked her.

“Good,” she said, neutrally. “On the whole.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“It’s fine if I don’t think about the hunger. It’s been a year now since I actually fed. Fed fully on a human being, body and soul. It’s hard sometimes to keep the flavor, and the joy of it, out of my mind.”

I groped around for a response, but nothing came. “Yeah,” I said after slightly too long a pause, “I thought you were looking slim. Think of it as a detox diet.”

Juliet frowned, not getting the reference. Now didn’t seem like a good time to explain it.

“So you’ve got a spook?” I said, to move things along. “A graveyard cling-on?” It was one of the commonest scenarios we came across in our profession: ghosts clinging to the place where their mortal remains still rested, anchored in their own flesh and unable to move on. Some of them got the hang of the wiring and rose again as zombies; most just stayed where they were, getting fainter and more wretched as the years went by.

Juliet looked at me severely. “In this graveyard? There hasn’t been a burial here in centuries, Castor—look at the dates.”

I did. Joseph had bitten the dust in 1782, and Caroline three years later. More to the point, all the stones were leaning at picturesque angles and most were green with moss. Some had even started to sink into the ground so that the lower parts of their eroded messages of grief and pious hope were hidden in the long grass.

“There are no ghosts here,” Juliet said, stating the obvious.

“What then?” I said, feeling a little embarrassed and annoyed to have been called on such a basic point by my own apprentice. Few ghosts hung around for more than a decade or so—almost none past fifty or sixty years. There was only one case on record of a soul surviving through more than a century, and she was currently residing a few miles east of us. Her name was Rosie, and she was sort of a friend of mine.

“Something bigger,” said Juliet.

“Then holy water is probably just going to piss it off,” I said, nodding toward the bowl. She gave me a meaningful look and thrust the bowl into my hands. I took it by reflex, and to stop the contents slopping over my coat.

“I never said it was holy,” said Juliet.

“So you were washing your hair? You know, human women tend to do that in the privacy of—”

“Turn around.” She pointed toward the church.

“Widdershins or deasil?”

“Just turn around.” She put her hands on my shoulders and did it for me, swiveling me 180 degrees without any effort at all. The touch sent a jarring, sensual charge through me and reminded me yet again, as if I needed it, that Juliet had physical strength in spades, as well as the spiritual kind that Susan Book had been talking about. I stared up at the looming bulk of St. Michael’s, which now blocked off the setting sun so that it was just a monolithic slab of ink-black shadow.

“My kind have a gift for camouflage,” murmured Juliet, her throaty voice suddenly sinister rather than arousing. “We use it when we hunt. We make a false faces for ourselves, pretty or harmless seemings, and we flash them in the eyes of those who look at us.” She tapped the rim of the bowl and a ripple shot from edge to center of the water within, then from center back to edge in choppy, broken circles. “So the best way to see us is not to look at us at all.”

I stared into the bowl as the ripples subsided. I was seeing the inverted image of St. Michael’s Church. It didn’t look any better upside down. In fact, it looked a whole lot worse: black smoke or steam was roiling off it in waves, downward into the inverted sky. It looked as though it was on fire—on fire without flames.

Startled, I raised my eyes to the building itself. It stood silent and somber. No smoke, no fireworks.

But back down in the bowl, when I looked again, the black steam rolled and eddied off the church’s reflection. St. Michael’s was the heart of a shadow inferno.

I stared at Juliet, and she shrugged.

“Anyone you know?” I asked, aiming for a flip, casual tone and missing it by about the length of an airport runway.

“That’s a good question,” she acknowledged. “But for later. Come inside. You need to get the whole picture.”

I felt like that was the last thing I needed, but I stayed with her as she set off down the small hill toward the church, taking the same direction in which Susan Book had gone.