“Use her magic for real,” I breathed. The Corpsetaker wouldn’t have to limit herself to people who could contact the dead, people from whom she could try to wrest consent, as she had done to Mort.

She could simply take someone new—and then she was back in the game, a body-switching lunatic with a hate-on for the White Council and all things decent in general. Her boss, Kemmler, had apparently slithered his way out of being dead more than once. Maybe her whole freaky-cult operation had been a page from his playbook.

I vanished to the bottom of the stairs and screamed, “Murph! Hurry!”

But I saw no one at the top of the stairs.

Sir Stuart stood in front of Boz, clenching his jaw and his ax in impotent rage, as Boz lowered Mort to the ground and then leaned over him, reaching down with his huge hands to grasp Mort on either side of his head. A twist, a snap, and it would be over for the ectomancer.

But what could I do? I had nothing more than the ghost of a decent spell in me, and then I was misty history. Morty was beat to hell, exhausted, unable to use his own magic—or he damned well would have gotten himself out of this clustergeist by now. Even if he’d let me in—which I wasn’t sure he would do in his condition, not even to save his life—I doubted the two of us had enough energy and control between us to get him free. Mort could have called Sir Stuart into him, drawn upon the marine’s experience and the memory of his strength, but the ectomancer was still tied up. And besides, Sir Stuart was in the same condition I was, only worse.

All of us were helpless to act on the physical world.

If I’d still had the Lecters, I could have ordered one of them to manifest and free Morty, which I maybe should have chanced a few minutes ago. Hindsight was blinding in its clarity. It was too late for that now—Corpsetaker had taken the Lecters out of the picture, and without the mad spirits’ ability to manifest in the physical world…

My thoughts sped to quicksilver flickering. Frantic memory hit me like a hammer.

“Hell’s bells. Every time I’ve run into a ghost, it’s tried to rip my lungs out! You’re telling me none of your spooks can do something?”

“They’re sane,” Mort shouted back. “It’s crazy for a ghost to interact with the physical world. Sane ghosts don’t go around acting crazy!”

For a ghost, manifesting in the material world was an act of madness—a memory trying to enforce its will on the living, the past struggling to steer the course of the present. It was, according to everything I had learned about magic and life, an inversion of the laws of nature, a defiance of the natural order.

Ghosts who weren’t supermighty manifested all the time. It wasn’t a question of raw power, and it never had been—it was a matter of desire. You just had to be crazy enough to make it happen. That was what the Corpsetaker had gotten from devouring the Lecters. Not sufficient power, but sufficient insanity. She just had to be crazy enough to make it happen.