The ghost was one of the millions of soldiers Jack had killed.
It was that Stonne from Hermes’s Skirmish, the one with a gaping hole ripped into his torso. Somehow, Jack remembered. He didn’t know how, but he did. Out of more dead soldiers than he could ever count, he suddenly knew this man.
The hole was still there in the man. Blood and frost mingled on his skin and armor; his halfway-opened torso was frozen dead, the heart and lungs still.
Holly had vanished. Invierno took on a reddish-orange cast, gleaming dully by the bloody moon’s light. It was just Jack and the soldier.
“Oh, no,” Jack said, stepping back. Trying to. But his foot was stuck, iced to the ground.
The ghost just stood there, completely still. Jack suddenly knew his entire life story – childhood, his wife, his two children, one working in the Agency, the other in school, depending on the soldier to come back and help pay for the expenses, his father killed in a battle fifty years before by Jack’s hand, the garden the soldier kept because he loved fresh vegetables, the way his family always sang lullabies to the children they sometimes kept when their parents were busy, his daughter was already boy-crazy, his son wanted a cat to name Sunspot, his mother hated snow—
It was all too much.
Jack screamed and crumpled onto his knees, the memory overload sending spasms of pain from his head all through his body. Something splashed over him, warm and thick. Jack clenched his eyes shut when a drizzle of the red stuff dripped past his eye.
“This isn’t happening,” he choked out. “It’s another nightmare...”
None of his nightmares, not even the worst ones, had been this bad.
The scent of blood choked him, ramming up his throat and blocking off oxygen. Jack leaned forward and pressed his face into the snow, hoping the bite would wake him up, but nothing happened. The snow felt warm, slushy, dirty.
Soldiers – Jack could see them even with his eyes closed – surrounded him, yammering in the language of the dead. Blood seeped from their frosty wounds, dropping onto Jack, already drenched in the stuff. Their wrinkled, leathery skin brushed his skin at times, and then their memories, their lives, imprinted on his mind.
Jack didn’t dare open his mouth for fear he would swallow actual blood, but inwardly, he screamed until his ears rang.
The nightmare, or whatever this was, wasn’t letting him take it sitting down.
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