“I’m sure Phoenix is nice…” Even I could hear the doubt in Kayleigh’s voice. Vibe was one of several first-years who had grown up in Los Angeles, and to her, every other town in the Free States was a shithole by comparison.
Which might have been true; I only had Bakersfield to go by, and God knew that city was a dumpster fire.
“Phoenix sucks,” countered Sofia, “but I’ve got a cousin there. It’ll be nice to get away from the usual Academy bullshit, even if it’s only for a few weeks.” She lay down length-wise on the bench, short, thick legs cropping through the ghosts seated next to her. “You’re welcome to come along if you want, Skeletor. Might do you some good to get away.”
“I already offered,” said Vibe. “Two weeks by the beach… amazing home-cooked meals, courtesy of my family’s chef… maybe even our first shared glimpse of a real night life.” Seated next to me as she was, I couldn’t see her expression, but I could feel the frown. “He said no.”
As far as I knew, Stonewall and his team had held firm to their promise not to share what they’d discovered about my past, but some pieces had made it out into the wild anyway. Like the fact that I didn’t have any family, if not the why and the how of it. Silt’s offer was actually the third I’d fielded, behind Vibe and—of all people—Jeremiah himself.
If I hadn’t been so distracted by the ghost-ridden mess that my life had become, I might have been annoyed by my classmates’ blatant pity.
“What I said was that I couldn’t.” I looked at both women, as new ghosts continued to file into the clearing. “I’m not allowed to leave campus.”
“Like… ever?”
“Until graduation, maybe. Bard wants me here, under supervision.”
“Well that’s bullshit.”
“According to some, it’s bullshit that I’m even allowed to be here.”
“So what are you going to do for two weeks?”
“See if I can grow a beard. Sleep in every morning. Watch vids in the common room in my underwear…”
“I really didn’t need to hear that last part,” said Vibe.
“That actually sounds better than Phoenix. Maybe I should—”
“Stick around and be bored out of your mind?” I shook my head. “Go get drunk in Arizona. Don’t worry about me.”
“Me? Worry? About some skinny-ass, broken-nosed Crow?” Silt’s smile took the sting out of her words. “Perish the thought. But if you’re sure…”
“I am.”
Any other year, and I would’ve probably liked the company. I’d gotten kind of used to it over the past few months. But I had plans for my summer vacation, and those plans didn’t have space for an Earthshaker, no matter how foul-mouthed and entertaining she was.
Don’t worry; we’ll get to those plans eventually. What they were and how they fell apart. How I took that first unknowing step down the road to forever.
That shit’s coming.
•—•—•
It was another ten minutes before Wormhole arrived, pushing through a wall of ghosts that she couldn’t even see. The sheen of sweat on her forehead told us that she’d once again decided to walk instead of teleport. Evelyn and I still weren’t what I’d describe as friendly, but I’d picked up from Sofia that the Teleporter rarely, if ever, chose to use her power.
Just goes to show how screwed up this world is. If I’d been able to teleport, I’d have done that shit constantly. I mean… fuck walking, am I right?
“There you are, roomie. I was starting to wonder if you—”
“Can we skip the small talk and get started? Please?” Vibe colored under the other women’s scrutiny. “I don’t mean to be rude, but we’re running out of practice time.”
“It’s just a history project, Kayleigh. What gives?” Silt made room for Evelyn to sit on the bench, which now held four ghosts and two live women in a nightmarish mishmash of bodies and limbs.
“I’m an Empath, Sofia. Public speaking is…” Vibe shivered. “Let’s just say it’s not my favorite thing ever.”
“I thought you were doing better with that stuff?”
Vibe risked a quick glance in my direction. “I am… sort of… but control takes concentration, and that’s going to be hard to manage if I’m improvising my way through the presentation!”
“You can always grab a handful of Skeletor if it comes to that,” said Silt.
“It won’t. Come to that, I mean.” Wormhole didn’t register as attractive on my stupid, eighteen-year-old scale, but her smile lit up the whole clearing. “That’s why I was late. I ran into Amos on campus.”
“What did the old fart have to say?”
“That we’ve been excused from next week’s presentation, on account of…” Here, her smile dimmed. “You know, Shane being in our group and everything.”
“Seriously?” Vibe frowned. “Why didn’t he just tell us so in class yesterday?”
“I don’t know.”
“Knowing Amos, he waited until the last minute to tell us so we wouldn’t spend all this time slacking off,” said Silt.
“Because God knows, free time is such a horrible thing.” I felt more than saw Wormhole gesture at me. “Is he spacing out again?”
“Says he’s tired,” replied Silt.
“He’ll be fine.” Once again, I could hear the doubt that shaded Kayleigh’s words.
I knew I should say something… anything… but I couldn’t find the energy to respond, or a voice to respond with. When Evelyn’s smile had faded, it had taken the light from the clearing with it. In the sudden darkness, all I could see were ghosts, pouring through the trees. Dozens of them, more than dozens, layered so heavily atop one another that I couldn’t see through them to the live people beneath.
The inaudible sound of the dead rose higher and higher until my bones were vibrating, and it was all I could do to wrap my arms around my legs and shrink away from the noise.
CHAPTER 44
That day in the clearing wasn’t the start of the downward spiral—that had been Shane’s death, or maybe Ishmae’s departure—but it was a breaking point. We had only a few weeks left until summer break, but I remember lying awake in the small hours of the night, surrounded by the silent, demanding dead, wondering how I could possibly make it that long.
I could have told my friends what was going on—fuck knows they must have noticed something was wrong, no matter how I tried to pretend otherwise—but what would any of them have been able to do? None of them even saw the ghosts. They sure as hell couldn’t help me banish them.
Alexa would have been a better choice as confidante, but she’d happily let me believe she was someone else for a whole semester. Maybe we’d find our way back to the trust that she was so fond of talking about, but that day was still a long fucking way off.
That left me alone with my problems. I did what I could to soldier on, but the greater the number of ghosts crowding in around me, the harder it was to look past them to the reality that lay underneath. I remember stopping on one of the long, winding paths through campus to yell at a pair of ghosts who seemed intent upon barreling into me. It was only when they both shied away, with muttered words and wary glances, that I realized they hadn’t been ghosts at all, but students. Normals, I’m guessing. First-years or second-years would’ve gone straight to Bard.
I’m sure Silt and Vibe tried to talk with me at various points, and I must have said or done the right things because life kept on going, but I don’t remember those conversations. I barely even remember exams; all my mind can conjure is the image of myself walking into the lecture halls and then walking back out again a few hours later, as if I’d been a ghost, watching my own body from a distance.
Finally, just when my mind was ready to snap with the strain of pretending that everything was normal, the semester ended. Students, both Powers and normals, fled the campus in a series of waves, rushing back into the outside world for a few weeks of relaxation and family-time. When the noise had died down, I wandered the
first-year dorm. I made certain that everyone had left, and then I returned to my room. I took a seat on my bed and waited and watched as the dead gathered around me in disorderly ranks.
I looked from Mom to Shane to the legions of strangers, and gave them all the smile that still made Silt shiver.
“Okay, you fuckers. Let’s get it on.”
•—•—•
There isn’t much information out there on Crows. Biographies and such, sure enough—as Stonewall and the others had found out—but that’s about it. Other Powers have it easy. There are dozens of books on the developmental paths a Pyromancer’s powers might take. There’s years of study on the multiple types of Shifters and how their transformations affect them biologically, and on the way some Powers work to oppose each other, like Shadecasters and Lightbringers, while others work in harmony, like Empaths and Sirens. But Crows? Nobody knows exactly what we do, let alone how, and the scientific community sure as shit isn’t interested in teaching us how to develop those powers.
In my more lucid moments over the past month, I’d gathered what data I could from the Academy’s digital library. Most of it was worse than useless; a combination of folk lore and superstition, all heavily flavored with fear. The only thing that had made any sense at all came from a philosopher in the early decades post-Break. He’d theorized that necromancy, by its very nature, was a struggle between the Crow’s will and the dead he was trying to control. If mind control had been a thing—and thank God it fucking wasn’t—he reasoned it would have functioned the same way.
Since the ghosts showed no signs of wanting to leave, it was clear I was going to have to make them go. If that took a battle of wills, then so be it.
•—•—•
Problem was… seated on my bed and surrounded by the dead, I had no clue how to start the war I so badly needed to win. The ghosts took my declaration of battle the same way they took everything I said; with a complete lack of reaction. Those who were screaming kept on screaming. Those who were weeping kept on doing so. The angry ones, like Shane, didn’t even pause in their silent rage.
And in the middle of it all was Mom, beaming and humming her soundless tune.
A full semester at the Academy and I knew as little about my power as when I’d started. Five months, and I’d never even managed to actively use it.
Mr. Grey should’ve just left me in Bakersfield.
After a wasted hour, I found myself thinking back to that first fight with Matthew. The first-years were still split on whether I’d used my powers then or not. I’d come down firmly on the side that chalked the whole thing up to a concussion… but what if I was wrong? What if I had used my power? How the hell had I managed it?
Paladin was off having happy home-time with his famous father and perfect family, so I couldn’t rely on the Stalwart to beat me into unconsciousness again. Nor could that have been the key anyway, seeing as how a dozen-plus beatings since had failed to trigger a similar reaction. So if it wasn’t the physical pain that had sparked my power… what was it?
I tried to remember my mindset during that first battle in the pit; the realization that I couldn’t win, my hatred of Matthew’s casual superiority, even my burning resentment that Nikolai had knowingly sent me down to get battered for his own amusement.
Beneath all of those thoughts and emotions had been anger, black and thick like Bakersfield mud after the driving fall rains, the anger that had been with me from those first years after Mom’s murder, giving me the strength I needed, helping me weather the blows that came again and again.
Anger? That I could do.
I closed my eyes and took a long breath. I reached deep for the anger I carried everywhere and let it bubble to the surface, I let it rise within me until it had flooded every part of me, until my fingers twitched with the need to scratch and claw. Then I opened my eyes, looking at a dorm room tinged red with a haze like blood, and I unleashed that anger at the ghosts around me, chasing it with every scrap of will I could bring to bear, all tied up into a single word.
Leave.
The red haze thickened and darkened until my vision was totally obscured. I collapsed back onto the bed, my pulse a loud drumbeat in my skull. Minutes passed before I was able to catch my breath, before I was able to do more than simply lie there and twitch. Eventually, I pushed myself back up to a seated position with one shaking hand, feeling as old as Amos. I swallowed once, then twice, and finally opened my eyes to see what I had wrought.
Absolutely nothing had changed.
God fucking damn it.
•—•—•
After that, things got a little incoherent. I remember conversations that couldn’t have happened and encounters that were almost definitely dreams. At various times, the asshole who murdered my mom showed up, and I drove him away by hurling pieces of furniture at him, but each time, that same furniture was whole and in its usual place moments later.
Somewhere in there, I must have gotten food at the cafeteria, but I can’t recall doing so, and none of the staff copped to ever seeing me come in. I don’t remember leaving the dorm room at all, even once, but at some point, I found myself back in that clearing on the west edge of campus. It was night, but I could still see, the world around me lit with the harsh light of the dead.
I tore my eyes from the ghosts rushing in from the tree line. The sky was full of stars that were not stars but spirits, drifting down out of the darkness like spiders on invisible threads of silk. I turned my eyes to the ocean, and found it disgorging waves of glowing forms onto the shoreline, miles away, forms that slithered their way towards me as if distance was just an abstract concept. As they neared, I realized they too were ghosts, many of them bloated and misshapen, swaying forward on staggering spectral limbs.
Where once there had been a single ghost, then two, then a few dozen, now there were hundreds. Maybe thousands. The silent, skin-crawling buzz filled me, drowning out every last shred of the world around me. I felt the rings of ghosts around me tighten. I felt the last remnants of space between me and that very first and smallest circle—the one that held Mom and Shane and two of the bandits Her Majesty had killed on the road—shrink until there was nothing left, until the air was not air, but the forms of the dead, and my lungs began to seize from the lack of oxygen.
And then I felt something new.
The endless, soundless hum stuttered, then stopped. The ranks of ghosts furthest from me shivered and broke apart, that pattern repeated again and again as a path slowly opened to where I huddled. Down that path came a woman, taking small, mincing steps forward as a thousand ghosts made way before her with reverent haste.
She was wearing a simple black dress straight out of old-time vids; little black buttons from the ankle-length hem all the way up the long column of her neck, every one of them securely fastened. Hair as dark as the dress was pulled back into a bun that added a decade to her appearance, but her pale face was young and unlined. A doll’s mouth curved insouciantly below a button nose, and high cheekbones made her look fancy rather than just underfed.
It wasn’t until she was within arm’s reach, when the last ring of ghosts had scattered rather than stand in her way, that I saw her eyes. Mud brown and empty, like freshly dug graves, they were eyes that every person in the country would have recognized and feared.
“Hello there,” she finally said, with a quiet smile that died somewhere in the abyss of those eyes, “My name is Sally.”
CHAPTER 45
Everyone knows about Sally Cemetery.
Everyone knows the things she did.
I should have been terrified when she walked out of the forest, spirits bowing before her like she was some sort of queen of the underworld. Instead, I remember only relief. I remember the way thousands of ghosts went silent, and the sweetness of the breath I took in that stillness; nothing but cool air filling my lungs. I remember feeling free for the first time since Shane’s death.
Even now, with everything that’s happened s
ince, with the terrible things I’ve learned and the equally terrible things I’ve done, there’s a part of me that loves Sally for that singular moment of release.
And the rest of me?
Well, that’s a little bit more complicated, isn’t it?
•—•—•
“How did you find me?”
Sally had arranged herself primly on a suddenly vacant bench, her delicate face turned up to the night sky, small mouth barely open as if silently laughing at a joke I couldn’t hear. At my words, she turned those cavernous eyes in my direction.
“The same way they did.” The endless ranks of ghosts around us shivered as if a stiff wind had blown through them. “I heard the call, and came to see who was making it.”
I frowned as her meaning hit me.
“You’re saying I’m the reason they’re here? I called them?”
“It certainly wasn’t me.” She patted the bench next to her with a lace-covered hand. “Take a seat and tell me your name.”
Her words were quiet, the voice almost sweet, but when Sally Cemetery tells you to do something, you do it. I sat next to her, far enough away to avoid the folds of her black skirt, and stuck out my hand. “Damian Banach.”
She looked down at my outstretched hand and something cold and dark crept into her smile. “You don’t want me to touch you.”
I let my hand fall away.
“Which is just as well,” she continued in that same empty voice, “as I don’t wish to be touched.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Men always are.”
It was my turn to shiver, though there was nothing cold about August in Los Angeles.
•—•—•
I don’t know how much time passed before she spoke again. The moon seemed fixed in place, like the ghosts ringed about us, like Sally herself, on the far side of the bench.
Finally, she stirred, a porcelain statue coming back to life.
“Someone died recently.”
See These Bones Page 23