THE GIRL AND THE GHOST

THE GHOST KNEW his master was about to die, and he wasn’t exactly
unhappy about it.
He knew that sounded bad. You’d think, after all those years
together, that even he might have felt a twinge of sadness about the
whole situation. But it’s hard to feel sorry for someone when: a)
you’re a ghost, and everyone knows ghosts don’t have hearts, and
b) that someone made her living out of forcing you to make other
people miserable.
He stared at her now as she lay on the narrow bed, gray and
gaunt in the light of the full moon, her breath rasping and shallow.
Watching her teeter slowly toward the end was a bit like watching a
grape slowly become a raisin: the years had sucked the life and
vitality out of her until she was nothing but a wrinkled shell of her
former self.
“Well,” she wheezed, squinting at him.
Well, he said.
“One more for the road, eh?” she said, nodding to the full moon
out the window. And she grimaced as she offered him the ring finger
of her right hand, as she had done so many times before.
The ghost nodded. It seemed frivolous, but after all, he still
needed to eat, whether or not his master lay dying. As he bent his
head over the wrinkled hand, his sharp little teeth pricking the skin
worn and calloused from time and use, the witch let out a sharp
breath. Her blood used to be rich and strong and so thick with her
magic that the ghost could get himself drunk on it, if he wasn’t
careful. Now all he tasted was the stale tang of age, the sour notesthat came with impending death, and a bitter aftertaste he couldn’t
quite place. Regret, perhaps.
It was the regret that was hardest to swallow.
The ghost drank nothing more than he had to, finishing quickly
and sealing the tiny pinpricks of his teeth on her skin with spit. It is
done, he told her, the words familiar as a favorite song, the ritual as
comforting as a warm blanket. And I am bound to you, until the end.
The witch patted his horned head gently. Her touch surprised him
—she had never been particularly affectionate. “Well,” she said, her
voice nothing more than a sigh. “The end is now.”
And she turned her head to the window, where the sun was just
rising over the cusp of the world, and died.