Chapter Seven
The crowd at Rodrigo’s had thinned, drink orders were less and less frequent, and Rodrigo stood near them while he chopped garnishes for tomorrow’s Saturday night rush. “How’s Lola?” Dahlia asked. “My apartment is too quiet without her. You need to go on another vacation.”
“I wish, but it will be a while before I can leave the bar again. Come walk her anytime. I know she misses you, too.” Lola, Rodrigo’s sweetheart of a beagle, was a fixture on Hawthorn’s campus, where she often stalked squirrels and stole snacks from students.
“Did y’all want one more?” he asked, pointing at their empty glasses.
Maggie shook her head. “No, we’ve got to get—”
A clattering noise interrupted Maggie, loud enough that she heard it over the crowd and the music.
Maggie and Dahlia both looked around the bar, confused, but Rodrigo started taking off his apron, muttering, “Shit.” The sound came again, this time louder, like something large and metal had fallen over in the basement.
“Shit,” Rodrigo repeated. “That’s got to be another ghoul. ”
Maggie and Dahlia jumped to their feet, any lightness or fuzziness they felt from the alcohol gone. Rodrigo turned on the bar lights and shut off the music. “Sorry, everyone,” he shouted to a bar half-full of confused patrons. “We’re shutting down early tonight.”
As he worked to close out tabs, he reached for the ancient phone on the wall, still connected with a curling cord.
“I’m calling the wardsmith,” he said as Dahlia handed him a damp receipt and a handful of money from a patron. “I can’t afford to lose anything else to this thing.”
Maggie and Dahlia exchanged a look. “The same wardsmiths that couldn’t even do a simple banishment spell last time?” Dahlia asked, and Maggie was glad that her friend was thinking the same exact thing she was.
Maggie and Dahlia may not have been warding experts, but they’d both helped fortify Hawthorn’s wards for years, and understanding the basics of fantasmia banishment was a core skill for anyone who worked in advanced magic, no matter what your specialization was.
“It’ll take ages for them to get here,” Maggie said, with a little bit more confidence than she truly felt. “Let us do it.”
Rodrigo held the receiver to his chest and hesitated. “Fine,” he finally said. “But I’m calling the wardsmith for backup. And then I’m coming down there to help you.”
“No,” Maggie urged. “When was the last time you banished a ghoul?” She conveniently ignored that it had been more than a decade for herself since she had come face-to-face with a fantasmia in the carefully controlled setting of her advanced seminar on banishment and other safety spellwork.
Rodrigo still looked as though he was going to argue, when Dahlia said, “We’ve got this, Ro. We’ll have this thing out of here before the wardsmith even gets here.”
Finally, Rodrigo nodded, and they sprang into action.
Dahlia produced a small, folded piece of quilted fabric from her purse and unrolled it, revealing five pieces of sharpened chalk in different colors.
She plucked out the green one, rolling the rest back up.
The chalk was made with a decoction of vervain, making it ideal to use in warding spells against fantasmia.
Maggie already had her phone out, scrolling through banishment spells they could use.
Banishments were legacy spells with ancient incantations.
It would need little modification for their current situation beyond time and place, same with the rune that Dahlia would draw.
A banishment would not only get rid of this ghoul but protect the space for a few days, the magic lingering like a sticky film.
As Rodrigo shooed customers out of the bar, Maggie and Dahlia paused in a shadowed corner near the stairs that led to the basement storeroom.
They opened the door slowly to try to avoid notice by the ghoul.
Maggie held her breath, waiting for some sound to break through the eerie silence.
Though she was prepared for it, she still startled at the sudden shuffling and groaning coming from what was undeniably a ghoul, searching for something, anything, to sate its relentless hunger, scratching against burlap and steel.
“I’ll distract it while you draw the rune,” Maggie whispered.
Ghouls, with their insatiable hunger, could be dangerous, and banishment spells took time.
Maggie’s stomach tied in knots as she thought about how to keep the ghoul busy long enough for Dahlia to complete the rune and for her to say the incantation.
It was a longer spell, with several stanzas.
“I’ll signal when I’m done, and we’ll say the spell together.
Then we can come back and fortify Rodrigo’s wards in the daylight. ”
Maggie gripped the railing hard, trying to gather the courage to go downstairs.
Ghouls were occasionally seen in cities, where they found restaurant stores and garbage bins as enticing as rats did, but wardsmiths were generally good at their jobs.
Unless, of course, the ghouls were feeding on a pall and found themselves in possession of preternatural strength.
Hawthorn should have done more to warn the town if the pall was going to last this long.
Ghouls were unsettling beasts. They were shaped like humans but didn’t quite know how to move like humans.
They had skinny, too-long arms and legs; gray, sallow skin; and hair like cobwebs.
Their teeth were often dull or missing, worn down by the constant chewing.
Most often, ghouls lived deep in forests like the Wilds, where they wouldn’t be disturbed by humans, gnawing on bark and moss and the occasional squirrel that wandered too close.
Like most wild animals, ghouls were relatively harmless when left alone, but a cornered ghoul stuck on the scent of sugar could easily become violent.
And even though ghouls were not particularly smart, they possessed a poison on their skin that left a chemical burn.
“Ready?” Maggie whispered. Dahlia nodded.
Maggie could see her face blanch even in the shadows as Dahlia gripped her chalk in her hands so hard that Maggie was afraid she would crush it.
She was about to suggest that they leave this work to the wardsmiths, which was probably the smart thing to do, when glass shattered below them.
No, they could do this. They needed to do this for Rodrigo.
Maggie gingerly set her foot on the first stair, cringing at the creak that came from the ancient wood.
The skittering from the darkness below stopped, and Maggie looked back at Dahlia, eyes wide.
Maggie knew they needed to go farther into the basement.
Their rune would be quickly calculated, using estimates at best, and the closer they could get to the ghoul, the better.
“Go,” Dahlia mouthed. “Fast.”
Maggie went as quickly as she could and Dahlia followed, dropping into a crouch when she got to the bottom stair.
She started drawing the rune across the last wooden plank, and Maggie kept her back to Dahlia, listening for sounds other than the chalk against wood.
The basement was nearly pitch black except for the cast-off glow of a streetlight that was coming through the remaining shards of the cellar door that led to the sidewalk.
The ghoul must have crashed through it, shredding the shoddy ward rune as it went.
Turning on another light would have alerted the ghoul to their presence, startling it out of its hunger and making it aware of the threat that Maggie and Dahlia posed, so Dahlia drew in the darkness.
A gurgling sound came from the center aisle, followed by a loud thump.
As Maggie’s eyes adjusted, she could make out the disaster the ghoul had caused.
One of the metal shelves had been knocked over and was leaning against the shelf next to it.
Boxes of dried pasta, cans of tomato sauce, beans, and jalapenos, and piles of still-wrapped loaves of bread were scattered all over the floor.
A stack of empty kegs had been knocked over, too.
And, there, in the far corner of the basement, was the ghoul.
It was crouched over a shattered jar of peperoncini, the smell of sour brine mingling with the foul odor of the ghoul as it brought the pickled peppers to its mouth in slow, uncoordinated movements.
It slurped them down, not even bothering to chew.
It seemed distracted enough by the peppers, until Dahlia dragged the chalk across the wood grain one more time and the ghoul paused.
“Hurry,” Maggie whispered. She watched in horror as the ghoul extended from its crouch, unfurling in small, jerky movements until it was fully upright.
Fuck. At its full height, the ghoul was monstrous, the top of its head nearly scraping the unfinished ceiling of the basement.
When it turned, slow and uncoordinated, its hands dragged across the floor, oblivious to the shards of glass slicing through its leathery skin.
Then it faced Maggie, its milky-white eyes boring into her, and let out a low growl.
Her stomach dropped and her heart beat so hard and fast in her chest that it was all she could hear.
She couldn’t let the ghoul near Dahlia and the rune.
Maggie took a step forward and reached for a jar of maraschino cherries on the shelf to her left.
The ghoul tracked her hands, jerking its head in an unsettling movement, its mouth falling open to reveal a row of worn-down, rotted teeth.
Maggie threw the jar. It arced through the air and down the aisle, coming into contact with the steel edge of the shelf and shattering, spilling cherries and sweet red juice all over the floor.
The ghoul fell onto the syrup, all limbs and snarls, dragging its too-long tongue across the dirt. Maggie was going to be sick.
“How much longer?” she asked, bending into a crouch, but never taking her eyes off the ghoul.
“Just one more minute.”
Maggie hoped the cherry juice was enough to sate the creature.
As she watched it, she practiced the incantation in her head.
It would take nearly eight minutes to complete the long incantation.
Eight minutes. How long would a jar of maraschino cherries distract a ghoul?
That was certainly never a question Maggie thought she would have to ask herself.
Dahlia reached up and grabbed Maggie’s arms, pulling her down to the rune.
“It’s done,” Dahlia whispered, and they both placed their palms on the chalk lines, energy already pulsing through their fingertips, waiting for them to activate the magic with the incantation.
As Maggie spoke the clear, sharp words, each one like a dagger in the basement’s stale air, the ghoul dragged its attention away from the cherries and back toward them.
Maggie didn’t stop, and soon Dahlia’s voice followed, repeating each line of the incantation after Maggie to increase its power.
For a breath, the ghoul stared, tilting its head to the side in an approximation of curiosity.
Maggie felt its lifeless white eyes on her like a brand, but she could not speed up the incantation for fear she would get something wrong.
The ghoul moved toward them, slow at first. It stopped to push a jar of pickles off the shelf, but when the jar didn’t break, it kept coming.
Maggie’s voice wavered as it drew closer and closer, and she wondered if it could feel the spell starting to drag on its skin.
As the ghoul closed the space between them, Dahlia’s chanting became more high-pitched, and they both trembled.
As the binds of the spell grew tighter, the ghoul’s movements became frantic and faster, and then suddenly it was upon them, all stale breath and too-sweet maraschino and rotting flesh.
It let out a strangled snarl and lunged, and Maggie lifted the hand that was not pressed into the wood grain and channeling the rune to protect herself.
The ghoul’s spindly, knobby fingers closed around her forearm, and searing pain shot through Maggie’s skin, but she didn’t stop to scream, even as one built in her throat.
Instead, she said the final word of the incantation, clear as a bell.
The ghoul’s grip tightened on her arm, and its rotting mouth was nearly upon her as Dahlia repeated the last line of the spell.
Maggie lifted her other hand off the rune as it glowed, ready to push the ghoul off her, but there was no need. A blinding light filled the cellar, and there was a sudden release of energy as the ghoul dissolved, a look of anguish in its milky eyes.