Free Ghostwalkers by Jonathan Maberry Page B

in surprise.
    And in …
    Pain?
    He felt pain, too, but Grey didn’t care. Probably a mosquito or a fly biting him on the neck.
    Nothing to worry about.
    Nothing to care about.
    He bent forward to reach for his glass of beer, but something jerked him backward.
    Hands?
    That was silly. There was no one here but a couple of girls and they weren’t strong enough.
    He laughed at the thought of whorehouse girls manhandling someone as big as he was.
    The pain in his neck became sharper.
    Harder.
    Worse.
    Wrong.
    He could feel heat on his throat. Wet and moving.
    Running in lines from where those flies were biting. If they were flies.
    He tried to speak, to protest, to ask what was happening. The room spun around him. All of the colors swirled and blended together.
    â€œI don’t understand…,” he heard himself say.
    And then he felt himself falling.
    Not forward.
    Down.
    Down down down.
    The colors melted into red and then into black.
    And then everything was gone.

 
    Chapter Sixteen
    Grey Torrance sat in a chair in the middle of the desert.
    The sun was high in the sky but the world was draped in shadows. The wind was cold and blew out of the east in long gusts, like the exhalations of some sleeping giant. In the darkness off to the north was a blighted tree and there were hundreds of crows standing silent vigil on the twisted limbs.
    Grey stared at the birds and they stared back.
    â€œPick a card,” said a voice, and Grey jumped, startled. He whipped his head around and saw that he was now seated at a table. It was covered with a heavy brocade in red and gold, and the surface was covered with embroidered dragons locked in death struggles with saints and angels. A woman sat across from him. Mircalla. Or at least he thought it was. She wore a veil over her pretty face, so all he could see was the faint outline of her features.
    Before her, on the top of the table, was a slender taper in a silver holder, the flame burning with no heat. And beside that was a deck of cards. They were larger than standard playing cards, and the design on the back showed the death mask of some ancient and beautiful queen. Her eyes were closed and blood ran from the corners of her mouth.
    Mircalla wore black lace gloves that had patterns of flitting bats on them. As he watched she drew her hand across the deck and fanned it out in a graceful arc.
    â€œPick a card,” she repeated.
    One of the crows in the tree cawed softly. It didn’t sound like a bird. It sounded like the plaintive call of a lost child.
    Grey licked his lips. They were as dry as if he had been lying all day in the hot sun. And yet he remembered drinking. A lot. And very good, cold, crisp beer it had been, too. So how could his lips be dry and cracked? Why would his throat be filled with dust?
    He looked down at his clothes and they were covered with dust and clods of dirt. He no longer wore the jeans, blue shirt, and black leather vest that he’d been wearing since coming west. His clothes were his old cavalry blues. The dirty-shirt blue he’d worn into battle against the Confederates back when he was a young man, barely out of his teens.
    His hands, though, were not the hands of a callow youth. They were not the hands he saw every day now, either. They were thin and wasted. The hands of an old, old man.
    Or the hands of something else.
    Something from which all vitality, all of the juices of life, had been leeched away.
    â€œPick a card,” said Mircalla once more. “Any card.”
    â€œI…”
    â€œGo on. They won’t bite.”
    She laughed, and it was a grating sound. Like a knife blade dragged across wet glass.
    He recoiled from the sound, but even as he did so his withered hand reached out to take a card. It slid from between the others with a soft hiss.
    â€œTurn it over,” she said. “Show me.”
    He turned it over.
    It was a tarot.
    It was the death card.
    Exactly the card he expected it