The Book of the Ghost Read online

  The Book of the Ghost

  Eric R. Asher

  Also by Eric R. Asher

  Keep track of Eric’s new releases by receiving an email on release day. It’s fast and easy to sign up for Eric’s mailing list, and you’ll also get an ebook copy of the subscriber exclusive anthology, Whispers of War.

  Click here to get started: www.ericrasher.com

  The Steamborn Trilogy:

  Steamborn

  Steamforged

  Steamsworn

  The Vesik Series:

  (Recommended for Ages 17+)

  Days Gone Bad

  Wolves and the River of Stone

  Winter’s Demon

  This Broken World

  Destroyer Rising

  Rattle the Bones

  Witch Queen’s War

  Forgotten Ghosts

  The Book of the Ghost

  The Book of the Claw*

  The Book of the Sea*

  The Book of the Staff*

  The Book of the Rune*

  The Book of the Sails*

  The Book of the Wing*

  The Book of the Blade*

  The Book of the Fang*

  The Book of the Reaper*

  The Vesik Series Box Sets

  Box Set One (Books 1-3)

  Box Set Two (Books 4-6)

  Box Set Three (Books 7-8)

  Box Set Four: The Books of the Dead Part 1 (Coming in 2020)*

  Box Set Five: The Books of the Dead Part 2 (Coming in 2020)*

  Mason Dixon – Monster Hunter:

  Episode One

  Episode Two

  Episode Three

  *Want to receive an email when one of Eric’s books releases? Sign up for Eric’s mailing list.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Eric R. Asher

  Copyright Page

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Note from Eric R. Asher

  About The Book of the Claw

  Also by Eric R. Asher

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2019 by Eric R. Asher

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Edited by Laura Matheson

  Cover typography by Indie Solutions by Murphy Rae

  Cover design ©Phatpuppyart.com – Claudia McKinney

  Author’s Note

  The Books of the Dead start here! If you’re asking yourself, “Self, what are The Books of the Dead and who is this Vesik fellow?” then you may not have read the previous books in the Vesik series.

  While I’m not one to judge, I’ve included an excerpt from Days Gone Bad, the first book—aka that one book with the exploding pigeons. And no, my 1-star reviewer friend, I do not condone the blowing up of pigeons in real life.

  Now that you know, please don’t summon the legions of the dead to pummel me because The Book of the Ghost ends around the 90% mark. If you think I write slow now, just wait until I have to do it while fending off Chuck the vampire.

  Enough of that. Strap in for a crazy ride, because we have a new installment of The Books of the Dead launching almost every month for a solid year. Now excuse me while I get a chimichanga.

  Thanks for the support!

  Eric

  ~

  Someone asked if I was going to apologize for that last cliffhanger, but then – oh look my chimichanga is ready!

  ~

  CHAPTER ONE

  Vicky clung to the spikes on Jasper’s back as they soared over the carnage of Falias. Tears threatened the corners of her eyes as Jasper rocketed toward the wooden platform below, leaving Damian’s colossal form behind. She’d find a way to save him, but for now their allies needed all the help they could get.

  And Damian had become the biggest threat to every soul on that battlefield. Shadows and skeletons erupted around his form, lashing out to swallow allies and enemies alike into a terrible darkness.

  The figures below, who so recently looked like dots upon a scorched plain, resolved into the scrambling forces of the Obsidian Inn. The dark-touched vampires engaged them in pockets, but whatever Damian had become was cutting people down without bias.

  A black blur in Vicky’s periphery caught her attention. A soulsword flashed to life in her right hand, the blade a fiery and vibrant gold. Jasper tried to roll away from the incoming vampire, but as agile as the dragon was, he couldn’t dodge the attack. It mattered little. Vicky let the anger rise through her body until her aura sang with the violence of a thousand murdered souls.

  One vicious slash sent the dark-touched reeling with a molten wound in its helmet. Jasper followed it down to where it crashed onto a wide wooden platform that held three massive stakes. This was supposed to be a place of execution, and Liam, Lochlan, and Enda were each tied to one of the stakes, waiting to meet their fate. Vicky hopped off Jasper’s back as the dragon took to incinerating the dark-touched vampire beneath his claws.

  Vicky’s heart leapt when a squadron of furry hunched forms crashed through the line of Nudd’s fairies. She’d know Caroline’s wolf form anywhere. The pale line of fur etched down the left side of the werewolf’s neck looked more like the pinstripe of an old car than the ancient bayonet wound Vicky knew it to be.

  The clash at Gettysburg rose up in Vicky’s memories, trying to take her out of the moment, trying to drag her back down into a darkness she’d fought for years to escape. The shadow of the leviathans, and Ezekiel, and the Old Man tried to smother the light from her mind, but she’d seen worse. Lived through worse.

  The battle below came back into sharp relief as she stuffed those thoughts deep into the back of her mind. Jasper’s scales were rocky beneath the soles of her boots when she mounted the beast once more. She swung her left leg over his spines and held on with one hand, waiting for his wings to thrust them into the sky once more, and at the peak of his ascent, she let go.

  “Everyone dies,” she whispered to herself as the wind whipped through her hair. “But not today.”

  The skies looked as clear as the targets below her, but she’d been mistaken. One second she’d been soaring above Falias in a mad dive, and the next a brutal impact sent the world spinning around her. She caught the glint of a stained armor before she realized what had hit her. An owl knight kicked her away, sending her reeling into a brawl among the werewolves. Vicky grunted as she bounced off her side and rolled to a stop.

  She took two deep breaths and climbed back to her feet.

  “Little one!”
Wahya roared, his golden fur rippling as he stood high on his hind legs, only to wrap his muscled form around a fairy before sending wings and dust and blood in three different directions. The werewolf grinned as he bounded along beside her.

  Wahya felt like home, felt like he had more of a connection to the Burning Lands than the other wolves, like she’d had with the Ghost Pack. Hugh felt like that too sometimes. As she impaled a distracted owl knight, Vicky wondered if the comfort she found in some of the wolves was because of the bond she shared with Damian and the Ghost Pack. Darkness seeped into the edges of her vision as the grief of losing Carter and Maggie welled up once more.

  “Get to Enda and the others,” Caroline growled. She turned and snapped the spine of one of the weird skeletons. “Get them out of here!”

  Vicky glanced farther down the platform as she spun, slashing through the skeleton Caroline had broken in half. And what had been the skeleton from the shadows crumbled to ash between the werewolf’s claws. The guards started to flee. Nudd’s own people started to flee.

  Liam pulled at his bonds as Vicky closed on him.

  “I’ve got you,” Vicky said. But before she could so much as slash the bonds from his wrists, Liam protested.

  “Get my parents first. They’re worse off than me. Untie them first.”

  Vicky hesitated for only a moment. As much as her instinct was to save the child first, she remembered what it was like to have people not listen to her, as if the fact that she was young discredited all of her experience.

  Liam pulled at his bonds again even as Vicky rushed a few steps to Lochlan’s side. The old Fae was far worse for wear. A dozen tiny gashes revealed a kind of torture Vicky couldn’t comprehend. Dried blood had crusted around the fairy’s eyes, and he barely protested when she grabbed his wrists and slashed his bonds away with her soulsword.

  “Get Enda!” Vicky shouted as Wahya came into her view.

  Wahya eyed Liam before reaching out a golden claw and severing Enda’s bonds. Enda slumped into the golden werewolf’s arms.

  “Is she…” Liam started, but his voice choked off into a cry.

  “She will live,” Wahya said. “We only need a healer. And we have many.”

  Both of Liam’s parents were still breathing, and the fact their flesh hadn’t been siphoned away into the ley lines was a good sign, but Vicky kept that thought to herself. Wahya snapped Liam’s bonds with his free hand, and though he reached for the boy, Liam refused, instead picking up a bloodied sword from the platform and squaring off against the skeletons that rode from the shadows.

  “What is that thing?” Caroline asked, following Liam’s line of sight up into the mass of skeletal riders surrounding the jackal-headed obsidian colossus.

  Jasper unleashed a blue barrel of flame, casting the area around them into an eerie light. Before Vicky could respond to Caroline’s question, the werewolf had already engaged with another fairy. Vicky slid around the battling pair, neatly severing the fairy’s head while it was distracted by the werewolf. Even as she felt some relief as the body collapsed and started to fade into the ley lines, she saw more of the ghosts from the corner of her eye. They weren’t calm sentinels anymore. They were moving of their own accord. While some of them meandered aimlessly, Vicky shivered as she realized the others were following the shadows of the vampires and Damian.

  “You may be asking yourself what that thing is,” Wahya said. “But the pressing question in my mind is how do we kill it?”

  “You can’t,” Vicky said, even as Enda raised a hand to her chest in agreement of Wahya’s assessment.

  “I’ve killed a great many things that people said couldn’t be killed,” Caroline said. “I’m sure it can die.”

  “You don’t understand,” Vicky said. “That thing is Damian. You can’t kill him.”

  Whatever Caroline had been about to say died on her tongue. Her lips curled back as the golden sunburst of her eyes narrowed. Wahya, standing on his hind legs, almost folded in on himself as he lowered to all fours. His shoulders sagged, and he stared up at the colossus in the distance before returning his gaze to Vicky.

  “How?” the golden werewolf asked. His voice was quiet, but Vicky could still hear him clearly over the distant battle.

  “Nudd,” Vicky said, and the name tasted like ash on her tongue. She hadn’t fought so long and so hard to lose her friends like this. Dying had been terrible, but it had given her experience. The thought of Damian becoming that thing, and realizing that the end of him was the end of Sam, felt so much worse than knowing her own life was at risk. But she wasn’t dead yet, and as long as her blades could still draw blood, she wouldn’t stop.

  “We have to get to the Morrigan,” Caroline said. “Get her to retreat. At least pull back the forces closing on Damian.”

  Wahya rolled his shoulders forward. “It may not buy her enough time.”

  “The only other choice is to kill him.” Caroline met Wahya’s gaze.

  Vicky looked at the Caroline. “If we kill him Sam dies too.”

  “And you,” Wahya said, turning his eyes to her.

  Vicky shrugged. “I’ve died before. It’s nothing new.” The words might have sounded flippant coming out of the teenager’s mouth, but that was the point. She hoped it would mask the uncertainty in her mind, the fear of dying she tried to hide from her friends. And the anxiety in her chest.

  “Little one,” Wahya said. “You need not hide your fears from us.”

  Vicky grimaced and lit a soulsword as another of the dark-touched vampires closed on their position. “Later,” was all she said before she dove back into the fray. But even as Vicky engaged with their enemy, all she could see were Wahya’s sad golden eyes looking down on her with something that was far too close to pity.

  Pity was something she didn’t need. If she’d learned anything from her years running with the Ghost Pack, it was how to be strong when the world around you crumbled to dust. She hadn’t felt helpless in a long time, and she’d never be helpless again. Anger flowed through her like a torch, and the soulsword in her hand condensed into a beacon of golden light. Skeletons collapsed at a lick from her golden blade. And this dark-touched would fall like all the rest.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Vicky lost herself to the chaos of battle. She let the soulsword fade and retract from the armor of the dead Fae at her feet. Even as the knight she’d slayed screamed in his death throes, she watched in exhaustion as a line of ghosts marched, trailing the path of destruction Damian had carved through Falias. They moved as one, like solemn horses leading a funeral hearse, and the sight set Vicky’s nerves on edge. All but one of the ghosts moved in tandem.

  She eyed that one stray ghost, an old Civil War jacket wrapped around his shoulders as his gaze wandered left to where the werewolves engaged the vampires. The ghost’s attention would be drawn back to the colossus, only to once more turn back toward the battle. Each step he took showed hesitation, and the oddity drew Vicky to him.

  She hurried to the ghost, carefully sidestepping a pool of gravemaker flesh that boiled and slithered through the matted grass as it followed him.

  “Can you hear me?” Vicky asked.

  For a moment the ghost just stared up at the colossus, but his brow furrowed and his eyes turned toward Vicky. She’d seen enough ghosts in her time to know when there wasn’t much left, when the thoughts of whoever they’d been had essentially become a video on a looped playback. This man was different. A golden glow sat behind his pupils.

  Vicky reached out without thinking, and screeched when the vision overtook her.

  She saw the soldier gunned down at a funeral. Saw the guitar fall from his hands and crash to the grass beneath them. Saw the Confederate, only a boy himself, howling mad over the dying musician. He screamed something about killing his brother, but Vicky’s eyes were all on the green man lumbering out of the woods behind the boy. It was over in a flash. One moment a human, the next a pulped mass of flesh beneath a wrecking ball of wood and
branches.

  The green man crouched at the dying musician’s side, and while Vicky couldn’t make out the words, she could see the shadow beside them. The leather jacket, jeans, and the silver eyes of a necromancer.

  The connection broke and Vicky collapsed to a knee. She gasped for breath as her vision dimmed. But this was no time to pass out. She looked behind her, horrified to see how far she’d run from the werewolves, from her only friends in this hellscape, before encountering the ghost. She limped toward them, stumbling and jogging as best she could before her foot caught on the empty armor of the Fae that had crumbled to the ground. She saw the soldier watching her as her vision finally gave out and a gentle paw lifted her into a werewolf’s arms.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The first thing to come back to him was his name. Terrence. Musician, soldier in the Union Army, and buried at Greenville above the Black River. But though he’d called Greenville home for over a hundred and fifty years, the place he stood now was nowhere near it.

  Memories of the conversations he’d had with Dirge and the man called Damian Vesik clawed their way to the surface of his mind. Even as something drew him toward the colossus in the distance, a golden light swelled in his vision, as if backlighting the world around him. He watched the werewolf, a massive golden hulk, so gently lift that girl from the earth. Whatever she’d done, she’d given him back some part of himself. She’d given him a light, a filter, that let him see nearby souls so clearly. But behind the crash of magicks and the screams of the dying, a voice whispered to him. It wasn’t a seductive temptation like the cloying force pulling him toward that colossus. It was a cry for help.

  “Only you. You’re the only one.”

  “Only one who what?” Terrence asked, surveying the battle around him. The surge of vampires and Fae and werewolves weren’t unlike the waves of a bloody ocean. When his eyes lingered on the colossus in the distance, a searing pinpoint of golden light flashed in his vision.