Chapter Eleven
I didn’t know that you could stagger as a ghost, but I did it. I looked down at my torso, confused and fuzzy-brained, and realized that I could barely see it. A few minutes ago, my spirit had been reassuringly solid, almost bodylike except for the whole flying-around-the-room thing. Now it was virtually transparent, like Billy Joe’s when he badly needed an energy draw.
Because spirits don’t make their own energy, do they? Only bodies do that. Living bodies, which I hadn’t been in. It was why even regular ghosts needed a talisman like Billy’s to feed them power, or a donor like me to give it to them, or a graveyard to haunt to pick up the scraps of living energy that human visitors shed.
Because, otherwise, they would fade away to nothing when they ran out of power.
Like I was about to do.
I stared around, trying to come up with some options, but I couldn’t see past the crowd. So I pushed off from the floor—easier this time, too easy, like I weighed about the same as a wisp of smoke. And quickly realized the truth.
I hadn’t affected the fight much at all.
It was more disorganized now, with the leader gone, but something else was gone, too. The last gleaming strands of the great ward had dissolved, leaving Augustine’s cobbled-together shield as the only barrier our side had. Which looked like it was going to last all of another second.
No, I thought blankly.
No!
But there was no denying it. After everything we’d done, after holding out for so long, after putting up a defense that nobody could possibly have expected, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to be enough.
“Cass! Cass!” I jerked my head down, to see Billy’s bright red shirt dodging through the sea of black.
“Up here!” I yelled, although it sounded more like a whisper. But Billy heard. And a second later, he was in my face.
“What are you—” he began, then got a good look at me and stopped. “Cass—you’ve got to get back to your body!”
“In a minute. I’m trying to—”
“You don’t have a minute! And neither do they.” He gestured at the shop, which had so many mages in front of it now that I almost couldn’t see it anymore. “Everyone in there is about to get killed—and your body along with them!”
“Why haven’t they left?” I asked, trying to clear my fuzzy brain. “I thought everyone was going to—”
“They tried. But Augustine—damn his eyes—was so worried about theft that he boxed himself in! There’s nowhere to go.”
“What do you mean, nowhere? There’s plenty of—”
But Billy was shaking his head. “A slab of support for the parking garage is directly below him, and we don’t have the firepower to blast through it. And even if we did, it’s load-bearing!”
“Behind him, then—”
“Cass, the casino’s main vault is behind him. It’s solid and it’s spelled. Nobody’s getting through that thing! And moving side to side won’t help when the other shops aren’t in any better shape, and most don’t even have shields! You’ve got to shift them out—”
“If I could shift, do you think I’d be here?” I asked, wishing I could think. But fatigue or panic or God knew what was clouding my head, making it impossible to do anything but stare at the battle. And at the shield, which was taking a hell of a beating.
I felt like that, too, like I could feel every blast myself. And if Billy was right, I was about to. But I didn’t have anything left. I didn’t have anything left.
“Cass, listen to me,” Billy said, his voice tight. “The Graeae are supporting the shield, feeding it power, but they’re looking pretty damn tired. And without them, it’ll stand up to maybe a second of that kind of barrage. If you’re gonna do something, it has to be now.”
And yeah, it did, I thought, blood I didn’t have pounding in my ears. Or maybe that was the spells, thud, thud, thudding against the shield, like the hands of that damn clock in London. Ticking down the seconds we had left.
London, I thought, as some thought scurried through my head, too fast for me to catch.
“Cass? I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but there is a way out.”
I looked up, to meet Billy’s worried hazel eyes.
“I’m going to help you, okay?”