“No!” she roared in someone else’s voice, and flung the broken glass away. It smashed to fragments against the hard side of the bathtub and flung out tiny jewels of crimson against the flesh-colored floor.
She clutched her left arm with her right hand—they were hers again—and tried to push the edges of skin back together. Her lips drew back from her teeth and she hissed in frustration as she fumbled about in the tiny bathroom, unable to find tape, gauze or bandages of any kind.
Blood continued to run in rivulets down her arms, dyeing her clothes and spattering walls and floor. She lurched into the bedroom and began jerking open bureau drawers. She found only heavy jeans, sweaters, nothing that would do, nothing she could tear easily.
“Tell me!” she roared in that other voice. “Find something! I won’t let you die, damn you, not yet!”
The next drawer yielded T-shirts. Valerie snatched up one and tore it down the seams. She managed to make a rough bandage of it, wrapping it tightly around the wounded arm. It was blood-soaked already, as she knotted it, but that didn’t matter; she had stopped the worst of the bleeding and Valerie would not die just yet.
But the moment she relaxed her vigilance the right hand was busy again, plucking at the knotted fabric, trying to let loose the blood.
Furious, Valerie slapped the left hand, then the right. Then her eyes rolled up in her head, her eyelids fluttered, and she collapsed on the floor.
Painfully, Valerie opened her eyes and saw the dirty floorboards. Her head hurt and she ached all over. Why was she on the floor? When she tried to move she felt as if someone had stabbed her. She gasped with pain, sitting up, then saw that her arm was wrapped in a blood-soaked cloth.
Quite suddenly the pain and dizziness turned to nausea. Valerie managed to move just enough to be sick on the floor rather than into her own lap, but afterwards she had not the strength to move away and remained staring dully into a pool of vomit, retching dryly every now and then.
Later—how much later? She only knew that the room had filled with shadows—Valerie managed to stand, the puppet miraculously moving without strings, and stumble into the bathroom to rinse her mouth. A sharp new pain made her look down, and she saw that she had gashed her bare foot on a piece of broken glass. Broken glass, and blood, littered the floor. She stared dully, unable to make any sense of it.
Then a voice told her what to do. It was a relief to be spared thought, a relief to obey. Under direction, Valerie washed her wounded arm with antiseptic and bandaged it cleanly, cutting up two of her favorite T-shirts to make the dressing. She also tended her foot, picked the glass off the bathroom floor, and cleaned up her vomit. Finally the voice told her to go to bed and sleep and, a grateful automaton, she did.
Hours later she woke screaming.
She fumbled for the light and, blessedly, it came on. Valerie looked around, the sound of her own breathing harsh in her ears. She saw her clothes in untidy heaps on the floor; she saw the dirty, cream-colored walls; she saw the magic circle she had painted on the floor. From the corner of her eye she saw the awkward lump of bandage binding her aching arm, and began to tremble again. It hadn’t been a nightmare, after all. What had happened to her was real.
It was true. Using spells learned from books, she had summoned up a spirit. Only it hadn’t gone as the books had promised. Something had gone wrong, despite all her care, despite the magic circle. The spirit—Valerie remembered suffocating, remembered drowning—the spirit had not obeyed her commands—the spirit had—
“Possessed you,” said a voice so close it might have come from a man in bed beside her.
A little wildly Valerie turned, but she was somehow unsurprised to find herself still apparently alone.
“You tried to kill me!” she cried to the air.
“No. You tried to kill yourself.”
Valerie remembered the curving glass dagger she had made, and how she had plunged it into her own flesh and dragged it down, watching the blood bloom, feeling no pain.
“I was trying to kill
“You cannot kill me,” said the voice. “And how ungrateful of you to try. Did you not summon me?”
“But you were supposed to obey me, not—”
“Do you imagine you are worthy of being obeyed?” said the voice with awful contempt. “But there is much I can do for you, many benefits to be gained by accepting my presence in your body.”
“No,” said Valerie dully. It was unthinkable. She had only the dimmest memories of what it had been like, but she could remember the sense of suffocation, the utter darkness, the helplessness, and that was enough, more than enough. “I’d rather die,” she said.
“Little fool. Yes, you made that clear. Don’t worry—I need not stay where I am unwanted; not when I have so many options.”
“Why do you want a body at all?” Valerie asked. “Why not just be—free, like you are now?”
The sound of laughter in the empty air made her skin crawl.
