Prologue
THE GHOST KNEW his master was about to die, and he wasn’t exactly unhappy about it.
He knew that sounded bad. You’d think, after all those years together, that even he might have felt a twinge of sadness about the whole situation. But it’s hard to feel sorry for someone when: a) you’re a ghost, and everyone knows ghosts don’t have hearts, and b) that someone made her living out of forcing you to make other people miserable.
He stared at her now as she lay on the narrow bed, gray and gaunt in the light of the full moon, her breath rasping and shallow. Watching her teeter slowly toward the end was a bit like watching a grape slowly become a raisin: the years had sucked the life and vitality out of her until she was nothing but a wrinkled shell of her former self.
“Well,” she wheezed, squinting at him.
Well, he said.
“One more for the road, eh?” she said, nodding to the full moon out the window. And she grimaced as she offered him the ring finger of her right hand, as she had done so many times before.
The ghost nodded. It seemed frivolous, but after all, he still needed to eat, whether or not his master lay dying. As he bent his head over the wrinkled hand, his sharp little teeth pricking the skin worn and calloused from time and use, the witch let out a sharp breath. Her blood used to be rich and strong and so thick with her magic that the ghost could get himself drunk on it, if he wasn’t careful. Now all he tasted was the stale tang of age, the sour notes that came with impending death, and a bitter aftertaste he couldn’t quite place. Regret, perhaps.
It was the regret that was hardest to swallow.
The ghost drank nothing more than he had to, finishing quickly and sealing the tiny pinpricks of his teeth on her skin with spit. It is done, he told her, the words familiar as a favorite song, the ritual as comforting as a warm blanket. And I am bound to you, until the end.
The witch patted his horned head gently. Her touch surprised him—she had never been particularly affectionate. “Well,” she said, her voice nothing more than a sigh. “The end is now.”
And she turned her head to the window, where the sun was just rising over the cusp of the world, and died.
One
Ghost
FOR A WHILE after the witch drew her final breath the ghost sat very still, wondering what to do next. Theoretically, he knew what was supposed to happen: he was a pelesit after all, and a pelesit must have a master. And since he was bound by blood, his new master had to be of the same blood as the old.
It was finding this new blood that was going to be tricky. The witch had not been much for family. Or friends. Or, if he was being completely honest, people in general. There was a daughter, he knew, a little girl with lopsided pigtails and an equally lopsided grin. He had seen pictures of her, pictures the witch kept hidden in a drawer among bits of broken candles, coupons for supermarket deals long expired, a small mountain of coins: things she no longer had use for, or that weighed her down; things she had forgotten or wanted to forget. There were letters too, slanted words written in deep blue ink, the paper old enough that yellow age stains had started to blossom at the edges:
I know you don’t approve, but he loves me and I love him, and we want to be together.
We have our own home now, wouldn’t you like to come and visit us?
Please write to me, Mama. I miss you. Don’t you want to see your grandchild?
The last one was newer, a rectangle of plain white tucked into a crinkly brown envelope bearing the witch’s name. It said: Do not contact us again.
No, the old witch wasn’t much for family; instead she roamed from village to village, sending the ghost out to cause all sorts of chaos in each one. And in the beginning, he’d loved it. There was a sort of dark pleasure in going about a village in his other form—that of a tiny, unassuming grasshopper—bringing bad luck wherever he went; in souring the milk while it was still in the cows; in emptying the fish traps without leaving a single hole in the weave of the net, so that the fishermen scratched their heads in confusion; in rotting whole fields of crops only on the inside, so that the harvester’s hopes lifted at the sight of perfect-looking fruit only for it all to explode in maggots and gloriously bad smells at the lightest touch. The ghost would look on his work with pride, like an artist admiring his own masterpiece, and chuckle to himself when the villagers came looking for the wise and learned witch, who nodded sagely, took the money they offered her to rid them of their curses, never letting them suspect she was the cause of all their troubles in the first place. Magically, everything would go back to normal, and before long the witch would disappear again, on the road to somewhere new—always before anyone figured out that the true curse had been her presence all along.
But if he was honest with himself, as the years passed, he found it all very tiresome. There was a steady stream of customers at the witch’s door, and if they weren’t asking for a way to undo her handiwork, they were asking for the same petty meanness, the same tiny bad magics as all the others: a curse on this business, a pox on that house, an impossible-to-remove wart on that one’s nose.
Humans, the ghost thought, were just so . . . unimaginative. He was hoping this new master, wherever they might be, would mean a change of pace. New management, as it were.
He pictured the little girl with the pigtails and the wide grin and he stretched out his thoughts, spreading them as wide as he could, listening for the familiar song of the blood calling to him, feeling for its comforting warmth coursing through fresh new veins, pumping through a strong new heart. . . .
He found her in a wooden house on the edge of green, green paddy fields, a house that rattled and shook when the monsoon winds blew.
She was a woman now, tall and tired and pale. Her pigtails had been replaced by a severe bun and her grin had long since vanished, but there was no mistaking that she had the blood. And yet—the ghost sniffed, puzzled—that familiar, calling song was faint and weak, sometimes fading out altogether. And even when her eyes were open, there were shutters behind them that remained very definitely closed. It was as if the light inside her had burned out, and nobody had bothered to replace the bulb.
For a long moment, the ghost paused, wavering uncertainly between staying and going. On the one hand, the witch had been adamant: a pelesit must have a master to control his appetite for destruction, his craving for chaos. Already, he could feel the tug of the darkness, hear the little voice inside him whispering thoughts of ruin and rampage. At the same time, he wasn’t even sure this woman’s blood would be strong enough to bind him and keep the darkness at bay.
The ghost was still trying to make up his mind when he heard it. The laughter.
This is how he learned that there was also a child.
And the way her blood sang—it was as if she lit up from the inside and made the whole world brighter as she toddled through it, babbling and giggling on chubby bare feet caked with dirt. The witch’s song had been rough and raucous, and it swept you up the way a pirate shanty does, or the musical howls of drunkards stumbling home. But the child’s song wrapped the ghost in a tender weave of comfort and belonging and glorious wonder, sweet and innocent and intoxicating. And as he watched her, he felt strange new sensations welling up from deep within the cavernous recesses of his chest, a mix of pride and an overwhelming sense that this was a child bound for greatness. What a heady honor to be bound up in it. He hadn’t supposed he was capable of such thoughts; the witch had certainly never inspired anything more than prickling annoyance. Was this the change he sought? He needed?