The Downside Ghosts Series Books 1-3: Unholy Ghosts, Unholy Magic, City of Ghosts

I find those words so exciting. Because urban fantasy can be anything, really; you can do anything with it. You can write about a drug-addicted witch who works for an atheistic totalitarian magic-based “Church” who runs the world after a ghost apocalypse. You can write about a punk-rock ghetto run by drug lords, where the aforementioned apocalypse means basics like electricity are hard to come by. You can write about ghosts walking the earth, using weapons, killing people. You can write about those same ghosts captured and forced to “live” in a vast underground cavern from which escape is almost impossible.

And you can play with that. You can think of what sort of world blossoms around such basic information, about revolutionary groups and legal vs. illegal magic and the mix of tech and magic, and what knowing exactly what happens when you die does to humanity at large. You can explore how the basic characteristics of humanity, both the good and the bad, might be heightened or suppressed by such a world, and in what ways they might stay the same.

But it’s not just fantasy worlds and the greater issues of humanity. It’s individual people. One of the things that appeals to me so much about dark urban fantasy – that has appealed to me ever since I read NEVERWHERE fifteen years ago (I know there’s some debate over this, but as far as I’m concerned NEVERWHERE is indeed urban fantasy) – is the lack of rules. It may not be a new genre, but it’s a genre still finding its classifications and tropes, which means there’s plenty of room for experimentation. You can do so much with it. You can write very unconventional heroes and heroines, you can write very dark worlds, you can explore just about anything.

So many genres seem very set in their ways at this point. And I know there are people who think urban fantasy is nothing more than kick-ass chicks in black leather slaying and sleeping with nightclub-owning vampires, written in a sassy first-person voice. But it isn’t. The book you’re holding right now isn’t. That doesn’t make it any less dark urban fantasy, anymore than it makes those other books any more dark urban fantasy. It’s all dark UF, and that’s why the genre is so exciting, and why I love writing it.

The Downside Ghosts series is about a witch plagued by the figurative ghosts of a horrific, abusive childhood that she takes drugs in a futile attempt to forget, living in a world plagued by literal ghosts who want nothing more than to destroy every living being they find in a futile attempt to steal that life energy for themselves. It’s about black magic and punk rock and drugs and sex and horror and misery; it’s about finding acceptance in unlikely places and about looking for acceptance in the wrong places; it’s about how one cannot hide from the world forever; it’s about our weaknesses and our strengths; it’s about hope and despair.

And hopefully it’s pretty damn scary and exciting, too.

I certainly hope you think so, and that you enjoy it.

Book One (#ulink_7bdb3892-6226-5c79-92a5-26304922a7cd)

To Cori. Not just my best friend, but my best reader. Her enthusiasm for this book in its earliest stages and beyond kept me going; her friendship kept me sane.

Chapter One (#ulink_907ec05a-1ecc-50bb-886c-976faa5a4bec)

“And the living prayed to their gods and begged for rescue from the armies of the dead, and there was no answer. For there are no gods.”

—The Book of Truth, Origins, Article 12

Had the man in front of her not already been dead, Chess probably would have tried to kill him. Damned ghosts. A year and a half she’d gone without having to deal with one—the best Debunking record in the Church.

Now when she needed her bonus more than ever, there he was. Mocking her. Floating a few feet off the parquet floor of the Sanfords’ comfortable suburban split-level in the heart of Cross Town, with his arms folded and a bored look on his face.

“Too good to go where you’re supposed to, Mr. Dun-lop?”

Mr. Dunlop’s ghost gave her the finger. Asshole. Why couldn’t he just accept the inevitable?

He’d been an ass in life, too, according to her records. Hyram Dunlop, formerly of Westside, banker and father of two, all deceased. Mr. Dunlop should have been resting for the last fifty years, not turning up here to rattle pipes and throw china and generally make a nuisance of himself.

Right. She set the dog’s skull in the center of the room, checking her compass to make sure she faced east, and lit the black candles on either side of it, her body moving automatically as she arranged her altar the way she’d done dozens, if not hundreds, of times before. Next came the tall forked stang in its silver base, garlanded with specially grown blue and black roses. She set the bag of dirt from Mr. Dunlop’s grave in front of the skull for later use.

Her small cauldron in its holder took a few extra minutes to set up. Mr. Dunlop moved behind her, but she ignored him. Showing fear to the dead—or any sort of emotion at all—was asking for trouble. She filled the cauldron with water, lit the burner beneath it, and tossed in some wolfsbane.

With a stub of black chalk she marked the front door and started on the windows, stepping deliberately through Dunlop’s spectral form despite the unpleasant chill. The set of his jaw lost some of its defiance as she pulled out the salt and started sprinkling it. “This is probably going to hurt,” she said.

Her gaze wandered to the grandfather clock in the corner, just outside the sloppy salt ring. Almost eight o’clock. Fuck. She was starting to itch.

Not badly, of course. Nothing she couldn’t handle. But it was there, making her mind wander and her toes wiggle in her shoes, when she needed to be sharp.

She’d just begun closing off the hallway when Mr. Dun-lop bolted up the stairs.

The symbols on the doors and windows—she’d already done the bedrooms—would keep him from leaving the actual building, but … shit.

She’d forgotten the master bedroom fireplace. The chimney flue.

Pausing only long enough to snatch up the bag of grave dirt, she raced after him. The grave dirt wasn’t supposed to come until later, when the psychopomp had already shown up to escort him, but it was the only way she could think of to stop him.

Mr. Dunlop’s feet were only just visible when she reached the bedroom, hanging in the fireplace. She grabbed a small handful of dirt and flung it at them.

Dunlop fell. His silent lips formed words that were probably not kind. She ignored him, ducking into the fireplace to mark the flue with chalk before he could try again. “There’s no escaping. You know you shouldn’t be here.”

He shrugged.

From her pocket she pulled her Church-issued Ectoplasmarker—nobody ever said the Church was clever, just that they knew how to protect humanity from spirits—and uncapped it. Dunlop stared up at her, his face rippling in panic. She leaned toward him and he sank through the floor.

Before he managed to disappear completely she ran back downstairs and grabbed her salt, finishing the hallway while Dunlop floated through the ceiling—outside of the circle.

In the short time they’d been upstairs the atmosphere in the room had changed, her energy mingling with that of the herbs to fill the room with power. Chess glanced at her altar. The dog’s skull rattled and clicked like a set of castanets, rising slightly from the floor. The psychopomp was coming.

Dunlop backed away when she started toward him, holding the Ectoplasmarker out in front of her. She’d already memorized his passport symbol. Now she just had to get him back into the circle and get the symbol on him before the dog came.

Only once had she heard of a Debunker who didn’t manage it. He got lucky. The dog took the ghost. But that was luck, nothing else. Without the passport, the minute that dog finished materializing could be the last minute of her life.

Dunlop bumped into the wall and glanced back, surprised. Ghosts could choose to touch inanimate objects or slide through them … until the object was solidified on the metaphysical plane.

“I marked them.” She used her foot to break the line of salt. “You can’t get through them. You can’t escape. This will be a lot easier if you just relax and let me do my job, you know. Why don’t you come here and hold your hand out for me?”

He folded his arms and shook his head. She sighed.

“Okay. Have it your way.” She crushed asafetida between her fingers and sprinkled it over the floor around him. “Hyram Dunlop, I command you to enter this circle to be marked and sent to rest. I command you to leave this plane of existence.”

She jumped when the growl echoed through the room and the skull leapt into the air. The rest of the dog flowed into existence behind it, each bone sharp and clean in the wavering candlelight.

Shit! Shit, shit. She was still the only one in the circle.

Worse, they both smelled of asafetida. She hadn’t rinsed her hands yet. The dog—magically created to sense the herb—wouldn’t know the difference between them.

Chess screamed as the skeletal dog lunged at her, skin and fur growing over its bones. She fell into—fell through—Hyram Dunlop. The cold was worse this time, probably because she wasn’t ready for it, or maybe because she was terrified by the sight of those sharp, shiny canine teeth snapping the air only inches from her arm. If they reached her—

The dog’s mouth closed around her left calf, pulling. Eyes appeared in the formerly hollow sockets, glowing red, brighter as it firmed its grip and tugged.

Behind the dog the air rippled. Shadowy images superimposed themselves over the tasteful taupe walls of the Sanford house, silhouettes gray and black against lit torches.

Something inside Chess started to give. The dog—the psychopomp—was doing its job, tugging its lost soul out of the Sanford house and into the city of the dead.

But her soul wasn’t lost—at least, not in the way required.

Hyram’s eyes widened as she reached for him again, her hand passing through his chest.

“Hyram Dunlop, I command you—”

The words ended in a strangled gurgle. It hurt, fuck, it really fucking hurt. It was peeling, as if someone was tearing away layers of her skin one by one, exposing every tender, raw nerve she possessed, and she possessed so many of them.

Her vision blurred. She could let go, if she wanted to. She could float away—the dog would be gentle once it knew it had her—and vanish, no more problems, no more pain, no more …