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Not human. His skin was grayish, his eyes mere depressions in his head, and as Marla
stood watching he disappeared, shredding apart into wisps, leaving Finch standing
empty-handed over a plastic-covered bed smeared with gray slime.
“Oh, nasty!” Marla cried. “You fuck ghosts?” She’d heard of ectoplasmophilia, though
it was, to say the least, a rarefied taste—it took a lot of power to give a ghost enough
substance to make penetration possible. Most of the sorcerers Marla knew, generally as
morally relativistic a group as one could imagine, found the whole idea appalling, akin
to bestiality, though personally Marla thought it was more like fucking dead animals.
Ghosts couldn’t technically consent, true, but they were only just barely conscious, just
a psychic heat-signature left over from someone’s death. Marla didn’t think
ectoplasmophilia was particularly immoral. She just thought it was gross.
Finch took a white hand towel from his bedside table and wiped gray goo off his cock.
“Shut the door,” he said quietly.
Marla kicked it shut behind her, and it actually closed, though it didn’t exactly hang
straight on the frame anymore.
Finch stretched his arms over his head, then cracked his neck. “I wish you’d come in ten
minutes later,” he said. “I would’ve been finished, and then I wouldn’t be starting this
conversation filled with quite so much rage.”
Marla rolled her eyes. “Like I knew you were going to be shagging Casper. I thought
you’d be sitting up here cross-legged in a mystic circle, collecting sexual energy.”
Finch shrugged. “None of that energy is going to waste, I assure you. And you
disapprove of my sexual practices, Ms. Mason?”
She wasn’t surprised he knew her name. Since he hadn’t tried to kill her yet, she’d
assumed he must have some idea who she was. “I don’t disapprove, exactly, any more
than I disapprove of watching someone eat roadkill. To each his own. I just think it’s
disgusting.”
Finch nodded thoughtfully, walking to a small closet. Marla tensed, but Finch just took
out a thin red robe and put it on, tying the sash carefully. “Every sorcerer, apprentice,
and low-class alley wizard in this city knows that if they betray me or hurt me, I’ll bring
them back from the dead and rape their ghosts. It’s a surprisingly powerful deterrent.
Even though most profess belief that the ghost is just a collection of metaphysical dead
skin cells, not in any sense the soul of an actual person, they still don’t want me to get
my spirit hands on their ghosts.”
Marla felt a grudging respect for Finch after he said that. Any sorcerer could make
outlandish threats—it was practically their stock-in-trade—but Finch clearly followed
through. He was also queer for ghosts, and got off on what he did, no question, but
everyone had kinks—who was she to judge? “I can see why that might make people less
inclined to fuck with you.”
“And on that note, how can I help you, Ms. Mason?”