“I know an old friend of his,” she agreed, walking slowly toward me. “And there were so many ghosts in the Badlands, so desperate for another chance—”
“You couldn’t have fed this many!” I raged.
“I didn’t feed them,” she said casually. “The Black Circle did. I made the same deal that your dad worked out with them, only I didn’t lie. He promised them a ghostly army; I delivered. Just with a twist.”
Yeah, a big one. Facing a ghost army would be bad enough, but Jo had borrowed another idea from dear old dad. She’d stuffed her ghostly corps into real human bodies, combining the two types of necromancy into one.
Only that still didn’t make sense.
“You can’t control t
his many! No necromancer could!”
“I don’t control them. I don’t have to. They follow the orders of whoever rings the dinner bell.”
“Meaning what?”
“That if they don’t follow orders, they don’t get any more life magic, and they slowly fade away. Unlike humans, ghosts don’t bite the hand that feeds them.”
And no, they didn’t. Like Billy Joe, asleep in my necklace, still worn out from almost draining himself in our fight at the consul’s. He was loyal, but he couldn’t help me here. No more than my acolytes could.
I stared around at her ghost army, clad in the rotting flesh of the plague-riddled bodies she’d dug up, and felt my stomach drop. They were going to break over us in a minute, and there was nothing I could do. Nothing! Ideas cascaded in my frenzied brain, but none of them stuck, except for one.
The one I didn’t know how to do!
“Wait!” I said, as she raised a hand.
“Oh,” she said politely. “Is this where we pause so I can tell you all my dastardly plans? Sorry, Pythia. I’m not in the mood tonight.”
“Why? Who am I going to tell?” I asked desperately, and she laughed.
“You? No one at all. But your acolytes might. I’ll go after them, once you are dead, but there’s always a chance I might miss one. And that would be a shame.”
“Wait!” I said again, trying to come up with another question; anything to buy a little time. Although that didn’t seem like a great strategy when we were about to be swamped anyway. I glanced up at the leaping creatures who were about to close over our heads, and then past them, to where the moon shone serenely down, the light as pure and clear as it always was.
Mother’s symbol; but she couldn’t help me now, either. And I shouldn’t need it! Damn it, why couldn’t I think?
“You gave me a good chase, I’ll give you that,” Jo said, sounding almost sympathetic for once. “But you’re out of acolytes, Pythia, and out of time.”
She raised a hand again.
“Not entirely out of acolytes,” someone said, which would have been weird enough, because there were only the two of us here.
But it sounded like it came from Jo’s throat.
And then she stepped into a moonbeam, and I completely lost the thread, with my brain going from careening out of control to stopping dead.
Because that . . . wasn’t Jo.
Chapter Fifty-three
“Lizzie?” For a moment, I didn’t believe my eyes. I’d killed her; I knew I had. But it was absolutely her: the same blond hair, still frizzy despite the rain; the same small, slightly myopic blue eyes; the same pretty, if slightly pinched, face.
Until she started laughing.
But not at me.
“Really? Really? Lizzie the Loser is going to come riding to the rescue?”