by E. E. Holmes
I had no words for her. Anger was beginning to stir, rising up through the numbness, forcing it aside. I turned my back on her without replying and ran for the door.
I shoved my way through the entrance hall, knocking people aside, ignoring their cries, blinded by tears. Somewhere behind me, Hannah and Milo’s voices called out, but I ignored them. My only focus was on reaching Ileana who had just slipped through the massive front doors.
I stumbled out into the night behind her, panting.
“Ileana.”
She turned, her expression triumphant. The smoke from her pipe wreathed her head like a laurel wreath of victory in the battle she had just waged against me.
“Why?” I choked.
“Oh, I would have thought the answer to that would have been obvious, Northern Girl,” Ileana said, raising her scraggly eyebrows in surprised amusement. “I cannot prove that you freed the Walker, but I know that you did it just the same. Action had to be taken.”
“I see. No mercy for Irina, no mercy for me. Everyone who defies you gets destroyed, is that it?”
She took several steps toward me, leering maliciously.
“We are the Travelers. We are a proud people and we do not brook interference from anyone. I handed down my judgment on Irina. You did not heed it.”
“It was wrong,” I said through gritted teeth. “You were wrong.”
“That was not for you to decide,” Ileana said. “And so, we have exacted our vengeance. Now we are square, Northern Girl.”
She raised her face to the sky and let loose a wild, cawing noise. I leapt back in alarm as a great swooping black something detached itself from a nearby tree and landed lightly on her shoulder. It was a raven, all shining ebony feathers and fierce snapping beak. It turned a single beady eye on me before turning to peck at the hair of its mistress, revealing an empty socket where its other eye had once been.
“A betrayal for a betrayal, Northern Girl,” she said softly, stroking the raven’s breast. Then she turned and walked away. I stood and watched long after the night had swallowed her, leaving me alone with nothing but the cold, distant stars above my head, and an aching hollowness in my chest.
II
Portraits of the Forsaken
The Gateway Trackers Book 4
25
Ghosts on the Underground
THERE IS SOMETHING BOTH INTIMATE and exhilarating about exploring a new city on your own. Getting to know its curves and angles, its sights and smells. Stepping into the light from the darkened entrance to the underground and realizing that you know where you are, and how to get where you’re going next. It’s like any relationship, really. There’s the initial trepidation, the hesitancy to even find the courage to introduce yourself. Then there’s the awkward question phase, an interrogation of sorts, when you’re trying to establish your suitability to each other. And then finally, the conversations flow easily and the smiles come naturally.
And so it was with me and London that spring—comfortable at last.
Yes, London and I were finally getting to know each other and, truth be told, we were getting along just fine. But there were two Londons to explore when you were a Durupinen: the London of the living, and the London of the dead. Today, it was the London of the dead that had my full attention.
The barista behind the counter of the café, for example, was dead. There was no doubt about that.
I watched her covertly as I sipped my tea, unwilling to draw attention to myself until I got a sense of her mental state.
She was young and beautiful, with a smile that kept faltering as she tried to go through the motions of a life she was no longer connected to. Through the warm haze of steam rising from my mug, I watched as she reached for an apron hanging on a hook, only to realize that she was already wearing one. She stared down at it, and I knew she was trying to remember when she had put it on. Then, shrugging off her confusion, she approached the counter and beamed politely at the elderly customer who waited there.
“What can I get for you today, love?” she asked brightly. Her smile faded into a frown of puzzlement when the old man did not acknowledge her, but gave his order instead to the young man at the other register.
The young man shouted the order over his shoulder, and the spirit sprang into action, purpose clear and determined on her face. But after a few moments, she was wandering amongst the equipment, unable to remember what it was she was supposed to be doing. Her eyes filled with tears as she watched another barista plunk the old man’s coffee down on the counter with a cheery, “Enjoy your day!” Then she spotted the aprons hanging on the wall and started the whole routine over again.
For me, these were always the saddest spirit encounters. It was heartbreaking to see the mixture of bewilderment and hope in their eyes as they poked and prodded at the new boundaries of their existence, fighting valiantly against a realization too awful to face.
I looked away from the spirit of the barista and down at a copy of that morning’s edition of The Sun under my saucer. The same beautiful face smiled up at me from a photo on the front page. The headline read, “Woman Found Murdered in South Kensington Flat, Boyfriend in Custody.”
I waited for an hour or so, watching surreptitiously as the young woman struggled to find her bearings, but she just wasn’t ready.
It was easy to tell when they were ready. A spirit would stop trying to force herself into a living role, and grow still, and quiet. She would look—really look—around herself for the first time. She would sense the distance that had sprung up between herself and the material world. And only in that stillness would she be able to sense the presence of the Gateway.
The Gateway was the doorway from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Most spirits passed through it right at the moment of death, but others, for reasons as varied as the spirits themselves, remained behind. But when those spirits were ready to Cross, they would seek out the Durupinen, the ancient sisterhood of women who acted as the gatekeepers, opening the Gateways and allowing trapped spirits to move beyond.
I swigged the last of my tea and stood up, throwing my bag over my shoulder. I would try again tomorrow. By then, perhaps, the spirit may have come to terms with her new state of being. It was always best to try to catch them early in that realization, before they started panicking and scaring the shit out of the surrounding living people by slamming doors and causing the lights to flicker.
I turned with the cup in my hand, ready to deposit it into a tray of dirty dishes, when a figure outside the window caught my eye. The man was tall and broad-shouldered, with shaggy dark hair that obscured his face as he strode by on the opposite sidewalk.
I gasped. The teacup slipped from my fingers and shattered all over the tile floor.
Everyone turned to stare at me, including the spirit behind the counter. Without intending to, I caught her eye.
“You can see me!” she cried.
I looked swiftly away, trying to pretend that I could not hear her. Mumbling a rapid apology to the still gawking staff, I bent and scooped up the shards of the cup and threw them unceremoniously into the trash bin. I bolted for the door, my heart hammering.
I skidded to a halt on the pavement and scanned the milling crowd on the opposite side of the road. I spotted him almost at once, overtaking a group of tourists huddled around a map.
“Finn!” I shouted.
He did not look up, or even break his stride. Cursing under my breath, I broke into a run.
“Hey! Come back! You can see me!” The barista had followed me out of the café and was gliding along beside me, her face stricken.
I ignored her, pushing my way past a man taking a selfie with a red phone booth. I had to get to the corner, where I could cross the street. I had to keep him in my sights or I would lose him in the bustle of the morning crowds.
The spirit was not fooled. “Answer me! I’m not crazy! You looked right at me! I saw you!” the girl shrieked at me. She planted herself in front of me,
but I barreled right through her, shivering violently at the bone-deep cold that only contact with a spirit could produce.
She screamed in terror. I swallowed back a wave of guilt. It was a shitty thing to do to a girl who didn’t yet realize she was dead. I would find a way to make it up to her, but not now. I reached the corner and jammed my finger at the walk button. Five months in this city and I couldn’t get used to the way the cars zipped past me from the opposite direction than I was expecting. Even the warnings spray painted onto the street, reminding me to “Look Right!” weren’t much of a help.
“You have to talk to me! You have to tell me what’s going on!” the spirit screamed. Her energy rose to an unbearable pitch, vibrating inside my head so that my vision blurred. The bulb in the traffic light beside us flickered, buzzed, and then exploded in a shower of sparks.
Unable to ignore her any longer, I turned on the girl and hissed, “Yes! Yes, I can see you! And I’m very, very sorry, but I cannot help you right now.”
“But what’s happening?” she sobbed. “I can’t remember what I’ve been doing, or where I’ve been. I don’t know how I got to work this morning. Why isn’t anyone answering me? And I feel so… so strange. So strange and numb.”
I took advantage of the motorists’ confusion over the traffic light to dart across the street. Undaunted, the spirit followed me, continuing to shout at increasing levels of shrillness. I blocked her out and focused all my energy on shoving through the pedestrians blocking my way. Twenty yards ahead of me, I could still see the dark head of hair bobbing through the sea of people.
“Finn!” I cried again, but the sounds of the crowds and the traffic swallowed my voice. “Damn it. Excuse me, please. Excuse me!” I said over and over again as I shoved and pushed and elbowed without mercy. Why the hell didn’t people know how to move!
If I lost him…
“Please, I’m begging you!” the spirit was sobbing now. “Is this a dream? Am I stuck in some kind of a dream? I can’t touch anything! I can’t feel anything!”
But I had frozen in a moment of panic. The head of hair, that familiar loping stride, was vanishing from view down into the Tube station entrance.
I tore after him, leaving a woman laden with shopping bags sprawled on the ground behind me. I took the steps two at a time, digging desperately into my bag for my wallet, trying to locate and extract my Oyster card with trembling fingers. The rumble of the approaching train muffled the cries of the pursuing spirit.
I slammed the Oyster card into the sensor panel and the gate slid open. I pounded forward the last few steps and caught his shoulder just as the train ground to a stop in front of us.
“Finn!” I gasped as I spun him around.
He turned, blinking down at me in surprise with a pair of bright green eyes I did not know. He pulled an earbud out of one ear. “What’s that, then?” he asked.
I jumped back, releasing my grip on his jacket. “I… I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
The young man smiled at me, revealing slightly crooked teeth and a dimple in one unshaven cheek. “Who do you want me to be, darl?” he asked, winking. “I’m sure I could give it a go.”
I tried to return his smile. “Sorry. You’ll miss your train.”
The man chuckled, shrugged, and popped his earbud back into his ear. Then he turned and slid deftly into the train car even as the doors began to close.
I stood motionless, watching him take a seat as the train picked up speed and trundled off into the yawning mouth of the tunnel.
I hovered on the verge of tears for a moment, then laughed bitterly at myself.
“You are losing it, Jess. You are officially losing it,” I whispered.
In the hollow, ringing emptiness left behind in the absence of the train, the spirit was still pleading and begging with me to help her. I took a long, shuddering breath and slammed the lid on the Pandora’s Box of emotions threatening to spill out of me. What a fool I was to dare flirt with a remorseless bastard like hope.
I turned to the spirit and held up a hand. She became utterly still in the shock of finally being acknowledged.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to ignore you. I’ve been looking for someone and I had to know if that was him.”
The girl didn’t answer. She seemed afraid to interrupt me now that I’d decided to start talking to her.
“I know you’re confused,” I said. “And I know you’re frightened. You don’t yet understand what’s happened to you, and that’s got to be terrifying.”
The girl nodded her head, unblinking.
“I can tell you what happened, if you’d like, but it’s going to be difficult to hear.”
Her wide eyes filled with the glimmer of tears, and she swallowed hard. “I… think I must know it, but… I can’t remember it clearly.”
“That’s just your mind protecting itself,” I told her, as gently as I could. “When something traumatic happens, our memories blur it out sometimes, so that we don’t have to suffer the pain of remembering it over and over again. Does it seem hazy and unclear?”
“Yes.” The girl’s mouth moved, but she made no sound.
I nodded. “It will become clearer, if you concentrate on it. You’ve been too distracted and too confused to really focus. Go back to the last thing you remember clearly and try to move your mind past it to what happened next.”
I stood and waited as she closed her eyes and reached back into the depths of her living memory. I didn’t watch her do it; I had long since learned to put some distance between myself and the raw pain of spirits, simply to protect myself. I tuned her out, focusing instead on the saxophone music drifting over from the far end of the Tube station. Reginald was in rare form today. I let the music wash over me, let it mask the gasps and sobs and utterances of disbelief now tumbling out of the spirit as she allowed herself to remember the unbearable end of things. Finally, when she had quieted and addressed me directly once more, I tuned back in.
“I’m dead,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She understood now.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“So, I’m… what? A ghost?” The last word was a horrified squeak, an acknowledgement of a thing she had never believed to be real. I felt the echo of it in my own memory—that first moment I came up against the harsh, undeniable truth of what once was fiction.
“Yes,” I told her.
“Why… why is it that you can see me?” she asked. “Why are you different?”
I laughed out loud and immediately stifled it. “Sorry. That’s just… such a loaded question.”
“What?”
“Never mind. You know the answer to this question, too. If you focus in on my energy, I think you’ll be able to see why we’re drawn to each other,” I said.
The spirit frowned, looking wary, but after a moment she closed her eyes and became very still again. I focused as well, making sure that I wasn’t working to mask the presence of the Gateway, as I often did when trying to avoid detection. I felt it happen, the moment the Gateway tugged at her, waking her up to its irresistible pull.
As we looked into each other’s eyes again, all the fear was gone from her face. It had been replaced with a raw, unfiltered wonder, and I smiled gently at her.
“You see?” I asked.
“Yes,” she breathed. “It’s so… can I go now?”
“There is a sort of… ceremony. And I need someone to help me, but, yes. You can go as soon as you wish. But first I must ask you if there’s anything you want me to do for you?”
Her face darkened like a storm cloud. “Will… will you make sure they all know what he did to me? I want them all to know.”
“I can’t promise what the outcome will be, but it sounds to me like they already do,” I said.
She nodded grimly, her fists opening and closing by her sides. Then she seemed to droop. “My parents. We weren’t speaking. I can’t go without telling them I’m sorry.”
“We’ll find a
way,” I promised her. “We can talk about it on the way. Will you come with me?”
She took a deep, steadying breath. “Yes. Yes, I’ll come with you.”
Together, we headed for the Tube station entrance. She floated along beside me, gazing around herself rather wistfully now, as though she realized that the world around her was already fading away, or rather, that she was fading from it.
I paused for a moment as Reginald finished out a long, complicated riff, and then applauded. “Beautiful, as always.”
“Cheers, duck,” Reginald said, with a tip of his hat. “Found yourself a taker today, did you?” He winked at the spirit of the young woman, whose mouth fell open.
“Yep,” I said. “You sure you don’t want to join us? You’ll have company for the journey.”
Reginald threw his head back and laughed. I could see the gold fillings in all of his molars. “Are you mad? I can play all day and night, and ain’t no one trying to stop me. I ain’t giving up this spot for nothing. Best gig I ever had.”
“Isn’t it tough, playing for an audience who can’t hear you?” I asked, smiling at him.
He leaned forward and winked conspiratorially. “Oh, they can’t hear me, duck, but they can feel me, believe you me. A busker should be so lucky.”
“Suit yourself. See you around,” I said. And, even though I knew that some stranger would just pick it up, I tossed a pound onto the ground into the specter of his instrument case before I walked away.
“Him, too?” the spirit of the young woman asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “If you stuck around among the living for a bit longer, you’d see that the world is full of spirits who have stayed behind, especially in a city like this. So old. So much painful history.”
“But… why do they stay? Don’t they realize…” She gestured to me, lacking the words to express what she sensed within me.
“Some of them do, like Reginald. Others can’t accept what has happened to them. There are so many reasons to stay, but don’t be fooled. None of them are as important as the reason to go.”