I didn’t have a cheek.
I didn’t have a hand, either, although there was one on the floor in front of me.
It was getting wet, too.
I swallowed, trying to focus, trying to think. But that was a mistake, since all my mind could focus on was that thing I’d just fought. On the feel of it eating my soul, tearing it away in great chunks, the darkness wolfing it down. Did you get it back? I wondered. Did you rebuild it like blood that was lost or skin that was shed? Or was part of you, a precious, irretrievable part, simply gone, gone for good, gone to feed the creature that had ripped you to shreds, that had raped your soul, that had—
Stop it! Just stop it!
After a moment, I did.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Start with what you know.
I was on a floor.
A floor with boots. And mud. And men walking over me as if I weren’t there, which made sense. Only, if I wasn’t there, why were they avoiding me? Why weren’t they stepping through me, like they’d done before? And why was one kicking me—
And yelling: “Get this bastard out of the way!”
I didn’t see the speaker, but a second later, someone was dragging my legs to the side and cursing. And then kicking me again, when he dropped me with a thud. But it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt.
Of course it didn’t; you’re a spirit, some still slightly rational part of my mind said.
But if I was a spirit, how had he been able to move me?
And why was my hand all bloody?
My eyes had adjusted slightly, allowing me to see it better. Or, rather, to stare at it, because it wasn’t my hand. It was too big, too tan, too covered in clumps of dark hair on the knuckles when I didn’t have any there at all.
I stared at it some more. And then at the arm connected to it. And then at the hole in the torso next to the arm, which was big and jagged and went all the way through, bisecting red meat and blackened ribs and—
And it looked like someone had thrown a fiery basketball through me.
No, I realized. Not a basketball. A spell.
And not through me.
Through the body—the very dead body—I was currently inhabiting.
For a moment, I didn’t believe it. I watched the hand move and flex under my command, and I still didn’t. I kept listening for a heartbeat I didn’t have, for breaths I wasn’t taking, for all the signs of a living body that weren’t there because I hadn’t ended up in one of those; no, no, I’d ended up inside a corpse.
So why was it moving?
Because it was. Slowly, sluggishly, my unshaven cheek scraping across the rough wooden boards of the sidewalk next to me, which should have hurt except dead, I was dead, so I couldn’t be moving because it takes blood pressure for that, right? And . . . and air and . . . things. I didn’t know much about magic, but I knew that, I knew that. The only creatures who could move around without those kinds of things were ghosts and vamps and—
Zombies.
I stared at the hand, and okay, yeah, it was looking a little zombiefied right now. Bloodless and dirty and blood-speckled, and if I saw that in a movie, I’d be like, yep, zombie. But it wasn’t in a movie, or on TV. It was at the end of my arm, and I was in a body, somebody else’s dead, disgusting, still slightly sizzling body and—
“Augghh!”
And, okay, I was definitely moving now.