"How do you know where it was hidden?"
Carter Slade's voice had gone cold. The friendly old gravekeeper was gone. In his place stood something older, something that remembered what it felt like to burn.
Abel pocketed the silk bag and turned toward the cemetery gate. "Maybe it was meant to find me."
He took two steps.
The sun vanished.
Not gradually. Not behind a passing cloud. The light simply went, as if someone had thrown a blanket over the sky. Abel looked up. A mass of dark cloud had materialized directly above the cemetery, unnatural and sudden, blotting out the morning in a disc of shadow that covered exactly the graveyard and nothing beyond it.
That's not weather. That's intent.
His instincts fired a half-second before the tombstone did.
Abel threw himself sideways. A granite slab the size of a coffin lid whipped past his head, close enough to tug at his hood, and smashed into a tree at the cemetery entrance. The trunk snapped like a matchstick. The tombstone buried itself in the earth beyond.
Abel turned.
Carter Slade stood thirty feet away. Wisps of flame curled around his forearms, licking at the sleeves of his jacket. His eyes, which had been watery and tired ten seconds ago, now burned with something that had no business existing inside a human body.
"Whoever you are," Carter said, his voice vibrating with a harmonic that wasn't entirely his own, "give it back. Or you sleep here forever."
Abel studied him. The flames were thin. Flickering. Not the full blaze of the Spirit of Vengeance, just the residual embers of a power that had been passed on decades ago. Carter Slade had been the Ghost Rider once. He wasn't anymore. What remained in him was a fraction, a pilot light where a furnace used to be.
Powerful enough to be dangerous. Not powerful enough to win.
"If you were the current Ghost Rider," Abel said calmly, "with the full Spirit of Vengeance inside you, I'd hand this back without a word. But you're running on fumes, Mr. Slade. I don't think you can make good on that threat."
Carter didn't respond with words.
He reached for a pickaxe leaning against the cottage wall, seized it with both hands, and let the hellfire pour. Flames erupted from his palms and raced up the handle, engulfing the metal head, crawling across his shoulders, his chest, his skull. In the space of a heartbeat, the old caretaker was gone. In his place stood a burning skeleton in work clothes, seven feet tall, wreathed in orange-red hellfire, holding a pickaxe that had grown to the size of a man and was now covered in skull-and-bone reliefs that hadn't been there a moment ago.
The former Ghost Rider roared. The sound was inhuman, a scream ripped from somewhere between rage and agony, and charged.
The pickaxe came down like a meteor.
Abel was already gone. Black smoke, spiraling upward, reforming ten meters to the left. His wand was out before his feet touched the ground.
"Bombarda! Bombarda! Bombarda!"
Three red bolts in rapid succession, each one slamming into Carter's burning frame. The explosions detonated across his ribcage, his shoulder, his hip. Carter staggered backward, driven by the concussive force, hellfire guttering at the impact points.
But he didn't fall.
The pickaxe swung in a wide horizontal arc, scooping up soil, stones, and shattered grave markers. The debris, ignited by hellfire, became a wall of burning projectiles hurtling toward Abel.
"Protego!"
The invisible barrier caught everything. Stones cracked against it. Fire splashed and died. The shield held without strain.
Carter used the cover. He charged through his own debris cloud, pickaxe raised, closing the distance in three massive strides. The weapon came down directly at Abel's head.
"Impedimenta!"
Blue light erupted from the wand tip. The Impediment Jinx hit Carter square in the chest and detonated outward in a concussive shockwave. The former Ghost Rider flew backward as if struck by a truck, tumbling through the air, crashing into a row of headstones that shattered beneath his burning body.
Abel didn't let up. He stepped forward, wand tracking, and fired a beam of white light at Carter's chest. A feint. Carter saw it coming, scrambled to his feet, and raised the pickaxe to block.
Exactly what Abel wanted.
"Expelliarmus!"
The Disarming Charm hit the pickaxe with the force of a cannon shot. The weapon ripped free from Carter's skeletal grip and spun through the air, the hellfire dying as it left his hands, shrinking back to its original size. It clattered to the ground twenty feet away, just an ordinary pickaxe again.
Carter lunged for it.
Abel's wand slashed through the air. Every piece of loose stone, every chunk of broken grave marker, every fragment of shattered earth rose from the ground simultaneously. They reshaped mid-flight, hardening, sharpening, becoming a rain of stone lances that descended on Carter from every direction.
The former Ghost Rider roared. Hellfire erupted from his body in a dome of searing heat. The stone lances hit the perimeter and melted, dissolving into slag that pooled on the scorched earth around him. The temperature spike was enormous. Abel felt it from thirty feet away, a wall of heat that dried his lips and stung his eyes.
Hellfire. It melts stone on contact. Physical projectiles are useless if he can generate enough heat.
Carter crouched, drove one burning hand into the earth, and pulled. A chain emerged from the ground, link by link, forged from the dirt itself and instantly engulfed in hellfire. He swung it overhead in a wide arc, the burning chain extending, whipping toward Abel with the speed and precision of a living thing.
Even retired Ghost Riders can't resist the chains. It's genetic.
Abel dissolved into smoke. The chain passed through the space where he'd been standing and cratered the ground. He reformed behind Carter, fired two quick Bombardas that staggered the skeleton, then dissolved again before the chain could reverse course.
The fight settled into a pattern. Carter swung. Abel dodged. Abel fired. Carter burned. Neither could land a decisive blow. Carter's hellfire neutralized physical attacks. Abel's Apparition made him untouchable. They circled each other in a dance of smoke and flame, the cemetery around them slowly being reduced to rubble.
I could leave. Apparate out, portal away, disappear. He can't follow me. But I'd be leaving an angry former Ghost Rider with a grudge and the knowledge that someone from Kamar-Taj stole from him. That's a loose end I don't want.
End it. Now.
The black smoke fell. Abel materialized, planted his feet, and raised his wand.
The chain whipped toward him. Fast. Burning. Aimed at his torso.
Abel didn't dodge.
"Diffindo!"
The blue-white cutting beam met the chain mid-swing and sheared through it. The severed links flew apart, hellfire dying on the broken metal. Carter stumbled, off-balance from the sudden loss of tension.
Abel pointed his wand directly at Carter Slade's burning chest.
"Expecto Patronum."
Silver-white mist erupted from the wand. Not a beam. Not a bolt. A wave. It poured outward like fog rolling off a cold ocean, expanding in every direction, washing over the cemetery in a tide of pure positive energy.
The effect on Carter was immediate and devastating.
The hellfire screamed. Not Carter, the fire itself, a high-pitched shriek of something being consumed by its opposite. The flames around Carter's body flickered, dimmed, and began to die. The Spirit of Vengeance's residual power, drawn from Hell, born of darkness and damnation, met the Patronus Charm's white magic and lost.
If Carter had been the current Ghost Rider, with the full Spirit of Vengeance inside him, the Patronus would have stung. Hurt, maybe. Slowed him down. But Carter was running on residual fumes, a fraction of a fraction, and against that, the Patronus was overwhelming.
Carter's roar became a whimper. The flames guttered. His burning skeleton form wavered, flesh reasserting itself over bone, the transformation reversing as the hellfire was extinguished layer by layer. He dropped to his knees, then his hands, then collapsed face-down on the scorched earth.
The hellfire went out.
Carter Slade lay on the ground, human again, breathing hard, thin curls of black smoke rising from his clothes. The cemetery was silent except for the sound of cooling stone and the old man's ragged breathing.
Abel lowered his wand. The Patronus mist lingered for a moment, silver-white and clean, then faded.
He walked to Carter and knelt beside him.
"Mr. Slade. Are you all right?"
Carter opened one eye. His face was grey with exhaustion, his body trembling. But his voice, when it came, was steady.
"What... was that? That silver light?"
"The opposite of hellfire." Abel helped the old man sit up. "I didn't come here to fight you. I came for the Contract, and I've taken it. But I'm not your enemy."
Carter looked at him for a long time. The fury was spent. What remained was the tired acceptance of a man who'd been carrying a burden for too long and had just met someone strong enough to take it from him.
"Protect it," Carter said. "Whatever you do with it, protect it. If Blackheart gets his hands on those souls..."
"He won't."
Abel stood and offered his hand. Carter took it, and Abel pulled him to his feet.
"One more thing, Mr. Slade. Johnny is heading into this alone. Blackheart still has two lieutenants, and he's not going to stop. If you've got anything left in the tank, tonight's the night."
Carter's jaw tightened. Something flickered in his eyes, deep and tired and stubborn.
"I've got one ride left in me," he said quietly. "One good ride."
Abel nodded. He opened a portal, stepped through, and was gone.
Carter Slade stood alone in his ruined cemetery, smoke rising from the scorched earth around him. He looked at the sky, where the unnatural clouds were already dissolving, letting the morning light return.
Then he walked to the barn behind the cottage and pulled the tarp off a horse that hadn't been ridden in thirty years.
END CHAPTER 53