Free Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel by Kate Elliott Page B

to travel the length and
     breadth of Europa seeing new places and, if I was fortunate, have adventures as he
     had had. I would have wanted a romantic interlude… at some unspecified later date.
    Bee had made her choice. She had chosen to be loyal to me.
    I released Kofi’s hand and smiled crookedly at him. “Thank you, Kofi.”
    Rory had fallen back asleep, so Luce took the first watch in a chair and I settled
     on a bed of blankets on the floor. I shut my eyes, but my mind kept pressing me back
     into the bitterly sweet memory of lying in Vai’s arms the one night we had shared.
     How he had kissed me! How was a gal meant to sleep if she could not stop thinking
     of his passionate caresses?
    The scratching at the window just would not stop. I sat up. Luce slept, one arm curled
     against her chest and the other flung out to one side. Kofi was leaning against the
     interior door, eyes closed, napping on his feet. I crawled over to the drapes that
     concealed the glass doors. I twitched aside the lower corner to peer out into the
     night-swamped courtyard.
    Shadows marked the glass in blotches and lines. Winged shapes flittered across the
     sky.
    A slender green finger was tapping on the glass. I recoiled. A branch had elongated
     until it reached the doors, as if trying to find a path inside. A bat perched on the
     swaying end, staring at me with obsidian eyes. I blinked, and it vanished.
    A man pressed against the door. He had Vai’s face and he wore a magnificent dash jacket
     printed with fishes spilling out of gourds.
    “We shall find a way in,” he said in a low, sweet voice. The scent of guava penetrated
     the glass separating us. I wanted to kiss him to taste the fruit, but I knew better.
     “Yee cannot escape us. We know yee killed her.”
    The latch turned but caught because it was locked. The key shuddered in a gust of
     wind.
    “You can’t come in,” I whispered.
    It was impossible to stare into those brown eyes and not be drawn closer; his lips
     tempted me; his hands reminded me of the kind of work they could do. But he was not
     Vai. He was an opia, the spirit of a dead man.
    “Open the door,” he whispered, “and yee shall have what yee so badly desire.”
    The hot look in his eyes drowned me. Next thing I knew, my hand was touching the key.
     I jerked away my hand and fixed it around the hilt of my sword.
    “Cat?” The drape rustled away from me.
    I jolted back as Kofi joined me. He looked into the courtyard with its dense shadows
     and a night wind trawling through the branches of the ceiba tree. The nearest branches
     of the tree waved twenty strides or more from the glass-paned doors. Of branch, bat,
     or male figure I saw no sign, although a small frog hopped along the paving stones
     along the side of the building.
    “I reckon yee shall step back from there,” Kofi said. “That tree have a powerful spirit.”
    Shapes were climbing in the tree, some grappling up and some slipping down. The movement
     made me dizzy.
    “Do you see them?” I whispered.
    Instead of answering, Kofi pulled me back, let the drapes cover the view, and settled
     me on the blankets beside Luce. I dozed off.
    A mosquito buzzed by my ear, and I kept swatting it away and itkept coming back, until I opened my eyes. Both Luce and Kofi slept soundly. But Rory
     was gone.
    One of the glass doors was open, its key fallen to the floor.
    With my ghost-sword in hand, I ran out into the courtyard. It was so late I heard
     not a breath of sound from anyone living.
    The soporific aroma of overripe guava drenched the air. As on a gust of wind, a cloud
     of bats poured down over the roofs that surrounded the courtyard. Their tiny bodies
     battered me. I drew my sword out of the spirit world where the blade resided and slashed
     at them, but they darted past into the shadow of the ceiba tree. A hundred ratlike
     rodents were hauling Rory up the trunk of the ceiba tree, calling to each other with
     whistling chirps and chortling