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:
