She asked the taxi driver to drop her off near the old Prince of Wales train bridge. The man seemed nervous, and asked her several times if she was sure, until she got what he was worried about and rolled her eyes.
“My friends are doing a ghost tour,” she said, holding up her phone. “They told me to meet them here.”
The driver didn’t seem to buy it. He was looking at the dark shape of the bridge looming over the river with suspicion the whole time it was in view, when he wasn’t pretending not to be watching her. Karry was used to being watched, but usually people were doing so with anger or fear, not concern. Once they crossed onto Lemieux Island, the driver finally saw the colourful bus of the ghost tour company idling in the parkway of the water purification plant, and seemed to relax a bit, even though he kept his frown.
“They shouldn’t be here,” he grumbled. “And neither should you, young lady. It’s dangerous at night. Why, I ought to report them.”
Katarina, amused at his concern, left a generous tip and asked him to come back to get her in a couple of hours. Her conversation with Myriam wouldn’t last long, and she didn’t want to have to deal with the hassle of calling another taxi to come get her here in the dead of night. The kindly old man was only too happy to agree, and she promised herself that she would leave another big tip later for his trouble. Good service was so hard to find these days, she had to encourage it when she could. Besides, what else would she do with her money? She wasn’t one of those billionaire supervillains whose entire gimmick revolved around being rich and shooting cars into space or whatever, so she might as well pay people properly for their work.
The taxi rolled off into the night, and she walked through the park and toward the river. The rusty old train bridge really was a spooky sight in it’s own right, dimly lit by the glow of the half full moon. To Karry’s eyes, it actually looked like two identical bridges, one on each side of the small island with old, overgrown tracks joining them. But for some reason it was know as a single bridge, she didn’t know why. Maybe the part on the island didn’t count.
A small crowd was gathered on the edge of the bridge, looking through the steel beams and down into the river with interest. Karry raised an eyebrow at the guide in the neon shirt at the front of the group, wildly gesturing toward the base of the bridge and making up some wild story or another.
The bridge really did seem dangerous, with no railing to speak of and gaps between the rails. Two large steel wires were bolted to the wall and acted as railings, and the tourists were leaning on them in a way that made even her largely useless heart have palpitations.
She stepped on the southern part of the bridge, but kept her distance from the group. Instead, she leaned on a steel beam, completely unfazed with her own safety, and disinterestedly watched the humans risk their lives in the middle of the night, on a supposedly haunted bridge, lead by a tour guide that most definitely did not have the legal right to be there.
It was amusing, in a way. In the way that it was none of her business and that humans were small and dumb. On the other hand, she hoped that Myriam would show up soon, because she didn’t fancy being around if an accident happened and the police had to get involved. The paperwork involved with being a vampire at the site of an unrelated death was always so tedious. She rather suspected that vampires in general had stopped killing people around the sixteenth century not because they’d all suddenly caught morality, but rather because paperwork had been invented.
Soon enough, a cold breeze touched her neck, and then her friend was next to her, sitting on the side of the wooden planks that served as a pedestrian walkway, with her bare feet dangling off it over the rapidly churning river below.
Katarina raised an eyebrow at her friend’s white nightgown, and Myriam gave her an impish smile in return.
“They think I’m a Victorian ghost,” she giggled, nodding toward the overexcited tourists. “Never mind how that makes no sense for this city.”
“And I suppose you haven’t been dissuading them of that notion.”
Myriam raised her hands, white and translucent in the moonlight, attempting a guileless expression that Karry knew full well didn’t come naturally to either of them. “All I did was sing at them!”
“What did you sing?”
Her friend pushed back a lock of ebony hair behind her ears, a ghostly and nonexistent breeze blowing it right back into her face. Her entire being was surrounded by a soft wind, playing at the edges of her nightgown, and a thick fog was beginning to raise over the river, curling over the base of the bridge. Soon enough, guessed Karry, fireflies or some such would show up, just to complete the picture. Myriam was such a sap.
“Oh, you know. Nursery rhymes and such, but I’ve been singing them very slow. It’s spookier! It’s been a big hit.”
Karry raised her eyebrows and looked at the Ghost Tour group again. “I can see that.”
There must have been close to thirty people on that bridge, pushing each other and straining to see into the murky depths of the water. The tour guide looked as if they were having the time of their life, holding their phone flashlight up under their face.
Technically speaking, Myriam wasn’t a ghost. To be a ghost implied that your body was dead; however, since Karry was currently using and getting around with that body, it didn’t really count as dead. It even had a pulse, most days. When she remembered to drink some blood so that her body’s heart would have something to beat around.
Or Myriam’s body. Their body. Whatever. At this point they had both as much of a claim to it as the other, despite the fact that it was Myriam who had had it first. But then that whole mess with the human sacrifice and the body given as a host to an eldrich horror beyond description had happened, and they’d been forced to cohabitate in that same body for a while.
Neither had been too happy about it, at first. Katarina had been pissed at the idea of being shoved in a flesh prison, and Myriam had resented having been used as an unwilling host and now having to backseat drive her own body, so to speak.
And then the reality of their situation had started to sink in. The necklace. The control.
A breeze of cold night air wrapped around the pair of them, and Karry took a deep but unnecessary breath, happy to enjoy this hard won silence between her and her old friend. They had been through so much together, that their bloodstained and angry past almost seemed like a fading nightmare. Something unreal, that couldn’t possibly have happened.
Katarina could have evicted Myriam at any time. She could have, from the very first second she’d been pushed into that body, obliterated the soul already in residence, or simply pushed her out to pass on to wherever humans went when they died. In fact, they were both fairly certain that that is what their captors had indented and expected to happen, and those captors had been properly baffled when Katarina had decided to share control instead.
But from her perspective, it had made perfect sense. She’d gone from a cloud of malevolent intention spanning the size of entire countries, to having arms and legs and wiggly appendages at the end of each of those. Obviously she would have to retain someone around who had some knowledge of how to operate all of that!
After a couple of decades, they had even come to something of a grudging respect, and then an accord. Katarina, or Karry as Myriam had taken to calling her, was technically the one being controlled. She was the one who had to answer to the call of the necklace, and she was the one who was prevented by magic from leaving the body she’d been shoved in. No wound nor time could allow her to escape it, unless the proper magical spell was unearthed and performed to return her to her previous noncorporeal state. Considering the patchwork mess of a franken-spell that had been used to call her there, Karry rather suspected that the appropriate counter spell didn’t really exist yet. If anyone wanted to get rid of her, they’d have to create it. Karry would have done it herself, but the runes used to summon her gave her a terrible headache, and the words blurred when she tried to say them, as if the magic that controlled her repelled all of her attempts at understanding it. A failsafe on the part of her captors, probably, or an unfortunate side effect of the mix-and-match nature of the spells they’d used.
But Myriam could leave. She didn’t have to stay around to witness all of the horrors that they were forced to inflict upon other humans. She didn’t even have to pass on, either; as long as her body was alive, and she was still somewhat tethered to it, she still counted as a living soul. With the help of Karry’s immense magic, Myriam had left their shared body centuries ago and became something very close to a ghost.
It turned out that she enjoyed this newfound freedom immensely. She’d once confided in Karry that she’d been expected to be a very proper young lady, before her kidnapping. Prancing around in a white nightdress and going ooooh and aaaaah behind people was the most fun that she’d ever had.
“Soon enough there’ll be too many tourists coming by,” said Myriam, breaking the silence. She fiddled with her lace sleeve. “It’ll get crowded. I’ll have to set shop somewhere else, I suppose.”
Karry turned her eyes to the night sky, scanning the few stars that she could still see through the rising fog. “Where were you planning on going?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps the old prison, or an ancient battlefield? I always thought a torn and bloodstained uniform would look dashing on me.”
“There are some nice spots to haunt in Toronto too,” she said, casually. “If you wanted.”
Myriam hummed in thought, drumming her incorporeal fingers on the edge of the walkway. “You’ve never asked me to live in the same city as you before. What’s going on?”
Karry hummed. “The end of the world, or so I hear.”
Myriam’s eyebrows raised all the way to her hairline. It was a strange expression to see on a face that was the same as hers. Myriam was so expressive while Karry was not, her face aglow with every thought that went through her mind.
It might have been because of what they were, their true nature shining though. Karry wasn’t created with a face, after all, and emoting had been a skill she’d had to learn as much as things like ‘breathing’ and ‘blinking’. Anyone who could read magical fluctuations stood a much better chance at reading her moods. She still, sometimes, tried to reach out with her aura, and then remembered that humans didn’t do that. It put her in a right snit, every time.
Or perhaps this sincerity was all Myriam, glowing with humanity and life even when she was not either of those things. Her earnestness was part of what made her such a precious friend, and also why it had been so hard to earn her trust in the first place.
After a short silence, during which Myriam apparently decided that Karry was serious, she looked back toward the tour group and frowned.
“Maybe we should have this conversation in private. Give me a moment.”
She blinked out of existence between one moment and the next, a soft rush of air disturbing the spot she’d just been occupying.
A low tremor shook the bridge, slowing gaining in intensity, and then the tourists started to scream.
“So,” said the ghost a bit later, when all the tourists had gone fleeing from their life.
Both of them were sitting on top of the bridge’s structure now, feet dangling from the metal beams over several hundred feet of open air and then rushing water.
“What’s that about the end of the world, then?”
Karry took a deep breath and braced her arms against the rusted metals and rivets under her, hunching her shoulder.
“SwordBright came to ask for my help,” she began, and then the entire story came tumbling out, in no particular order.
Afterwards, Myriam was silent for a long time.
“Our necklace…” she mused. “And did they say what the tyrant made you do, in the future?”
She shook her head, her long black hair being caught up by the wind. She hadn’t asked, and she didn’t want to know. The world had ended, somehow, millions of people dead, and the last thing that Karry could stand was to know if it had been by her hand.
No, scratch that; the last thing she wanted to know was if she had enjoyed it. So much power… Even before she’d had a body, she’d never had this many people know her name. She’d never been this powerful.
Myriam blinked a few times, looking blankly over the distance, where the river disappeared into the horizon. “You know what I think?” she finally said. “I think you already know what you want to do. I think you only came here to speak to me because you can’t stomach the idea of teaming up with a good guy and you need me to push you to do it.”
“Good person,” she corrected, automatically.
“It’s an expression”, retorted Myriam, cross. “I meant, that you’ve always seen yourself as a villain, and now you might get to be a hero, and it freaks you out.”
“And what in all of this would make me a hero?” she asked. “We steal from a museum, and then we kill a kid. Doesn’t seem very heroic to me.”
The ghost scoffed at her. “You? You are having qualms over killing children now? Oh, that’s rich.”
She pressed her lips together forcefully, a hot retort right on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed it back. They both knew what Katarina was, and how she’d come to be. There was no need to be rehashing it now, not after the hundreds of years that it had taken them to come to any sort of working relationship. Breaching the subject now rather felt like a step backwards, and so Karry let the comment pass.
“It’s not about killing the child. It’s about helping them. What’s stopping me from just getting my necklace and getting out of the country? There’s nothing to tie me to that place. I have no responsibility to these people.”
Myriam watched her for a long time, so long that Karry started to feel self-conscious under that gaze. Finally, the ghost sighed and said: “If you have to ask, I’d say that’s what’s stopping you is you. You’re either curious, or bored. Maybe you even have some spark of conscience about the entire thing, although I’d be surprised. Either way, I suspect you’ll go with SwordBright’s plan, for the time being. Won’t you?”
Katarina looked at the river, and at the taxi making it’s way back over to Lemieux Island to pick her up, and sighed in defeat.
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