Layla swallowed hard and finally acknowledged her host. “What’s your name?”
“Therese. Sit down, silly, so we can play.”
Layla didn’t want to, but the child might be her only way back. Even as Layla lowered herself to the floor, her stomach turned. She sat cross-legged, too. “I’ll play just as soon as you return me to my time.”
“Do you know the words?”
Layla wasn’t going to get sucked in to her game. “I want to go back to my time. Can you help me?”
“Say the words.” Therese gave her sweet smile, then shrieked, “Now!”
Scuttling back, Layla said, “I don’t know the words.”
Therese leaned forward, intently. “Yes, you do. Dead man, dead man, come alive . . .”
Oh. Layla had heard that somewhere before.
“Come alive by the number five.”
Layla recoiled from the madness in Therese’s expression. Sitting had been a mistake. She stood, headed for Zoe’s apartment. Anywhere was better than the company of the ghost child.
“Say it!” Therese screamed behind her, then added in singsong, “I’ll let you go. Just say: Dead man, dead man, come alive!”
Not likely. Layla wasn’t stupid enough to go along with anything about a dead man coming alive, especially on the instruction of a disturbed ghost of a child in a haunted hotel that imprisoned wraiths. There had to be other options.
Layla’s skin crawled as she rapped on what had to be Zoe’s door.
Please, open. Her heart hammered, tripping over its rhythm. She flushed with heat, then cold. The rhyme was bad news, had to be.
In an overlap of time, a translucent version of Zoe flung open her door and looked both ways down the hallway. She didn’t acknowledge Layla.
“Zoe!” Layla called, right in her irritated face.
But Zoe cursed and shut the door again.
“One, two, three-four-five!” Therese chanted.
Okay, Zoe was oblivious, but maybe a fae would be different. If Layla could just find Talia or Khan, maybe one of them would see her and get her out. Right? Was there another way? Fear fuzzed her mind like electricity, her thoughts almost breaking apart into panicky, incoherent bits, but she held on. She couldn’t stay here. Here was bad. Real bad. She had to get back to the elevator and the east side, where the ghost couldn’t follow. Then find help.
Therese was up on her feet. She stamped her foot, hard. “Dead man, come—”
The space in front of the elevator suddenly punched black. Shadow reached, swirling into the long hallway, like octopus arms in a swim of darkness.
Oh, thank goodness. Khan.
But the voice that spoke was female and shattering. “Lady Amunsdale!”
“She’s mine!” the child screamed back.
“She’s mine,” Talia answered from the void. There was no mistaking the authority with which she spoke. That voice was power, awesome in its cadence.
Darkness pounded down the corridor. It rushed over Layla, cold and slick, and finally she could see Talia. Her pale hair whipped in the dark wind of her Shadow, her skin glowing with a weird light, eyes full-black.
Fae, Layla identified, and stopped breathing.
Shadow grumbled over the walls, wrecking them and battering Therese in its wake. Layla felt a pang for a child harmed, though she was a mean little brat. Therese was tossed, and when she reemerged, she wasn’t a child at all, but a rag of a woman, bitterness lining her expression.
“I need her!” Therese the woman called.
Her reach was perversely long. She grabbed at Layla’s shirt with bone hands. On instinct, Layla whirled around to tear off the ghost, but gripped only air, though the ghost’s touch clawed at her still.
Layla felt as if her soul was slipping from the moorings of her body. Felt a sudden distinction between flesh and spirit, and she knew she was grasping after the wrong thing. Her soul lifted like a balloon, and she let go of Therese and grabbed hold of herself instead. Two spirits, one body, its heartbeat stalling.
“Leave her be, Lady Amunsdale.” Talia’s voice had lowered, but its power still sent currents through the warping dark. “Now!”
And Layla slammed back into her body again.
“Dead man, dead man . . .” Therese chanted again, but she lost her scraping grasp on Layla’s shoulder.
Layla looked back just in time to see Shadow harry the ghost off on the tide of its storm. The ghost reached toward her, straining in desperate misery, but was swallowed by the abyss at the end of the hallway. In a static suck of sound, the hallway was returned to its modern appearance, Layla at one end, Talia at the other, now looking more human, if very disconcerted.
Forget Khan. What the hell was Talia? Her, uh, daughter? More like Khan’s.
“Lady Amunsdale is a pest,” Talia said, breathing heavily. “Don’t let her get to you.”
Layla stammered for something to say. “She pulled me back in time. She wanted me. Why?”