by Karen Chance
He sighed and pinched the bridge of his longer-than-strictly-necessary nose. “You know that old story about time travel, the party analogy?”
“The—no, I—”
He sighed again. “Okay. Say you’re invited to a party—”
“What did you mean about outside time?”
“That’s what I’m explaining! You’re invited to a party, all right?”
“Okay.”
“The invitation tells you three things, longitude, latitude, and height, only it puts it more like ‘corner of Eighth and Elm, fifth floor,’ right?”
“Okay.”
“Could you get to that party?”
“I . . . guess so.”
“Really? Then you should have no problem getting out of here. Most people would need a fourth direction. Or to be more precise, a fourth dimension. Most people would need to know when the damn party was!”
He took off again, and I followed, getting pissed now. I grabbed his arm. “That doesn’t tell me anything!”
“On the contrary; it tells you everything. That party only exists as a destination at those coordinates and at that time. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist at all. We don’t live in three dimensions; we live in four, the fourth being time. Only most people never think about it.”
“Okay, fine. But what does that have to do with this place?”
“You asked where we were. I told you nowhere, because we’re not at the party. We can’t be when time doesn’t exist here. That damn Pythia shifted me outside it. No time means no time spells to let me get away from her. And I assume she put you out here for the same reason.” He raised a brow. “You must have really pissed her off.”
He took off again, which I’d pretty much come to expect at this point. And it looked like he was coming to expect things, too, because he stopped before I even managed to grab him again. “What now?”
“If my power won’t work, how do we get back?”
“That way.” He nodded to where Daisy was bouncing along, following an erratically moving sparkle until bip. It was gone. She glowed a little more brightly in her housedress and galoshes for a moment, before turning to grin at us triumphantly. “Got it!”
“Great,” Roger said sourly. “Now go get one with some damn oomph behind it!”
She made a face and flitted off. I just stood there, looking at him. “She’s hunting ghosts because they help you get out of here?”
“It’s more of a hobby,” he said sarcastically. “And they’re not ghosts.”
“Then what are they?”
“What remains of ghosts after they fade. This is the Badlands.”
“The what?”
He looked at me in exasperation. “How do you not know this? You have a ghost.” He looked pointedly at Billy’s necklace, which I guessed he could see because Rosier still had my chameleon. Or because if there was one thing Dad knew, it was ghosts. “Don’t you talk?”
“Not about this!”
“You sure? It’s not exactly . . . but then, I suppose he doesn’t need it, does he?” He picked up the necklace as easily as if it were solid. “That’s what I thought. Talisman, right?”
I just nodded.
“With this he can go, what? Forty, maybe fifty miles away? And still make it back to soak up all the energy it collects for him. And since you’re wearing it, that radius constantly changes, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but—”
“So he gets fed and doesn’t get bored. Unlike all those poor souls stuck in some overgrown cemetery somewhere, the kind nobody visits anymore. Ever wonder what happens when the weeds come but the visitors don’t? Ghosts live off shed human energy, but if there’s no humans—ever wonder what happens then?”
“I—”
“Well, I’ll tell you.” He sat on an insubstantial-looking rock and watched Daisy stalk another victim. “First, the ghosts begin to starve. But they’re not all equal, are they? So pretty soon, the newer, stronger ones start cannibalizing the older and weaker. Until, eventually, they either eat them all or drive them off to the Badlands. That’s where we are now.”
I looked around. No wonder this place was giving me the creeps. “So this . . . is like a cemetery . . . for ghosts?”
“In a manner of speaking. Only there’s no visitors. The only way to feed—as those who arrive with any sort of mind left quickly realize—is to consume the scattered remains of the less fortunate. If they do it enough, they might even mange to escape—”
“Escape?”
He smiled sardonically. “Now you’re getting it. Ghosts aren’t bound by the same rules as you or me. They can transition here and back again, if they have enough power. And here’s where it gets fun: they can take us with them.”
“Us?” I grabbed him.
“Us in the generalized sense. Not us as in you,” he clarified, prying my spectral hand off.
“But I told you, I have to get out of here!”
“Then use your own ghost. What am I, a charity?”
“But he’s weak. He almost faded saving me—”
“Then lend him some energy.”
“I can’t spare any! You have to help—”
“I told you: I don’t have to do anything. But you have to get back to your body.”
“Why?” I shot back, pretty sure he was just trying to scare me. “You said there’s no time here. So I can’t die, can I?”
“Maybe not. But you’re still outside—”
“So?”
“So spirits without the body’s protection are what again? Oh, that’s right. Big wads of energy, free for the taking.”
“And who’s going to take it?” I demanded. “Some old ghost remnants?”
“Um, excuse me,” Daisy said.
“No, little girl,” Roger said testily. “But they’re not the only ones out here, are they?”
“Aren’t they? You just said—”
“That ghosts who fade can lose their tether to time and end up here, but it’s by accident. Others come on purpose.”
“For what? Why would anyone—”
“To hunt. All those territory-less ghosts—or what’s left of them—might not be much individually. But together they form a nice, big pool of energy, and one with no awareness left to fight back. No hungry ghost is going to turn that down—”
“No way,” Daisy interjected. “I mean, just look at them all.”
“—and as a living being, you’re more tasty than a thousand faded spirits.”
“A human is still more powerful than a ghost,” I pointed out.
“Than a ghost, certainly,” Roger agreed. “But you forget—there’s no time here. So you’re not dealing with one era’s ghosts but with all of them!”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s all, but it sure is a lot,” Daisy said as I wondered why the air had started shaking around us.
And then I knew why.
“Fuck!” Roger said, and dove for the side of my cell, which was currently the nearest.
I just stayed where I was, rooted in place by the sight of an army of ghosts, thundering at us across the horizon. Like the entire horizon, because there had to be . . . I didn’t even know. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands, centuries’ worth of predatory ghosts, the strongest ones, the most successful ones . . .
The ones that were almost on top of me, I realized, and dove back inside my cell.
“What did you do?” Roger yelled in my face as something crashed into the wall behind me. Followed by a couple hundred friends, rattling against the exterior like gunfire. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Bullshit! They don’t act like this—they never act like this!”
“Then maybe you did something!”
“I know the Badlands—hell, I used to live in the Badlands
! And the ghosts don’t act like this!”
“Well, apparently, they do!”
“Not even for a disembodied human who doesn’t have the sense to—”
I caught sight of my body sitting up, with my tits in my hands.
“—listen when someone with more experience tells her—”
“Are you feeling me up?” I asked Rosier, because I knew it was him. Even before I spotted his own small form, lying limp and lifeless on the floor.
“I give up!” Roger said, throwing his hands out.
“That’s what’s concerning you?” Rosier shrieked, over the gunfire sound effects.
“It’s not helping!” I glared at him. “What are you doing in there?”
“Trying to keep you alive!”
“We’re outside time! I’m not dying!”
“And I’m supposed to know this how?” he demanded, still clasping my breasts, as if for comfort. Until I knocked his hands away, although that probably would have happened anyway.
Because we’d just rolled over.
I fell from the floor to the new floor. Which had been the wall, until the number of ghosts hitting us all on one side sent us clunking over. And then over again, and again, until it felt like we were in a wacked-out dryer set on kill.
“What are they doing?” I yelled, falling into Roger. Who snarled and pushed me off. Only to get my body’s foot in his face, because it wasn’t like there was a ton of room in here.
“Trying to shake us loose,” he yelled back. “The cell walls are wards, to protect the living from spiritual attacks. Ghosts don’t have the power to break through!”
“Daisy did!”
“Daisy is bound to me, as your servant is to you. The wards see them as part of us, and let them in!”
“Oh, good,” I said, relieved.
“No, not good!”
“Why?”
“Because we need to get to the barrier in order to shift!”
And then Billy woke up.
“The fuck?” he said, materializing beside me and staring around. At Rosier’s discarded body tumbling like a sneaker in the aforementioned dryer. At Roger, trying to brace in a corner. At me, attempting to hold steady in the midst of it all, hovering near the center of the roll. Until I gave up and grabbed Billy around the neck, just as Daisy drifted over.
“Hello, I’m Daisy,” she said, sticking out a hand.
“The fuck?”
“No, the Daisy.” She smiled at him. “Like the flower, you know?”
“Cassie—”
“We’re in the Badlands,” I told him breathlessly, which made no sense because this version of me didn’t need to breathe. But it was one of those moments. “And we need to get out—”
“We’re where?” His head twisted around to try to see me, because I was clinging to his back.
“In the Badlands. And a bunch of predatory ghosts are on the other side of that wall. We have to get out!”
“I— we just— Don’t you ever take a day off?”
“Will people stop saying that?”
“Maybe I would, if I ever woke up to find you making pancakes or something!”
“Pancakes,” Daisy said longingly. “I used to love pancakes.”
“Who the hell is she?”
“She’s a package deal with D—with Roger Palmer,” I said while the damn man glared at me from the corner.
“Roger who?”
“Palmer,” Dad and I said together, and Billy’s eyes got big.
“Palmer? The Roger Palmer, like Roger Palmer, your—”
I clapped my hand over his mouth, and look.
It did work.
“Can we just get out of here?” I asked. “Please?”
“I have no idea,” Billy said as Rosier’s body thump, thumped through him again. “Nobody goes to the Badlands. Nobody sane, anyway. I sure as hell have never—”
“I can help you,” Daisy said brightly. “It’s easy. Look, I’ll show you—”
“No!” everybody screamed as she started for the wall.
“What?”
“There’s thousands of ravenous ghosts out there!” I told her, incredulous.
“There are?” Her eyes got big. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
“Okay, so let me get this straight,” Rosier said, running my body like a hamster on a wheel, in order to keep up with the barrel rolls. “We can shift out of this, but only out there”—he nodded at the wall—“in the midst of a bunch of predatory ghosts who plan to eat us?”
“Yes.”
“And our ride doesn’t even know how this process works, because he’s never been here before?”
“Yes.”
“And the only one who has experience is her.” He hiked my thumb at Daisy. “Who is quite possibly mad?”
“I’m not mad,” she said. “But you could have said something. I might have been killed!”
I looked at Roger. “Is there an alternative?”
He shook his head. “As far as I know, there’s only two ways out of the Badlands. One, have a Pythia open a portal from our world, where her power works, allowing her to bring people in and out.”
“And the other is to piggyback off a ghost,” I finished for him.
“As long as they have the energy. You’re going to have to feed yours.”
“I can’t. There’s something I have to do, and it takes power—a lot of it. I’ve been taking a potion to enhance my stamina—”
“So take more!”
“I don’t have any more. And even if I did, you can’t enhance what isn’t there. If I drain myself too low, it won’t work—”
“Then you’re shit out of luck, aren’t you?”
I looked at Billy, but he was already shaking his head. “No way, Cass. I don’t even have to know what’s going on. I got nothing.”
“You could feed him,” I said to Roger, even knowing what the answer was going to be.
“I need my strength to feed my own ghost. She’s not quite there—thanks to you, I might add. Shining like a lighthouse and luring every damn spirit in the place!”
I stared at him. I’d never gotten much affection from my parents, who’d died when I was four. I’d spent my childhood dreaming about them, sneaking around, trying to find out any scrap of information I could. Which hadn’t been much, since my old guardian had instructed people not to talk to me. But I’d always wondered. . . .
And then I’d become Pythia, and gone back in time, to seek help from my mother in dealing with the demon council. Help she’d given, sort of. But there’d been no affection with it, no tear-filled reunions, no anything. Just grudging assistance and a swift push out the door.
And now my father was refusing even that, basically telling me to stay here and die for all he cared. I didn’t know why it hurt after so long, and after plenty of other indications of how he felt, but it did. It hurt so goddamn much, even though I hadn’t been born yet from his perspective, even though he had no way to know who I was.
Because it hadn’t made a difference when he did.
“That’s not going to help,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “I told you, I can’t—”
“But I can,” Rosier said, his voice harsh. I looked at him, and found him scowling at my father. “Get back in here,” he told me. “And get ready!”
I saw my face go slack as he stepped out of my skin. A second later I was stepping in, feeling the weight of my body hit me, pulling me the rest of the way to the floor. And to the rocks underneath, which bruised my palms when I abruptly hit down.
Because the wards were almost gone.
I hadn’t noticed, floating in the air, because the walls still looked the same. But they weren’t the same, maybe because nobody had expected them to have to put up with this kind of abuse. “The
wards—” I gasped, looking up.
And was almost blinded by Billy Joe, shining like a searchlight.
And then everything happened at once: Billy grabbing me and me grabbing Rosier; Daisy jerking a surprised-looking Roger off the floor, and all of us falling through the collapsing wards. Which left us behind on the ground the next time the cell rolled over, where we were metaphysically trampled by a crowd of ghosts. Who’d gotten so into the rush to destroy the cell that they didn’t immediately notice we were gone.
I lay there for a second, watching the mighty throng surge ahead, the remains of the small cell being tossed in front of them like a bouncy ball. And then we were up and running, dodging through the crowd of stragglers, who stared at us in surprise. For about a second.
Until their faces started to melt.
“Daisy!” Roger shouted as the spirits turned into nightmare fuel.
“Trying!”
“Try harder!”
“They’re too close,” she panted. “I’ll take some of them with us!”
“Then take them!” he yelled, sending spells and ghosts flying. But that wouldn’t work in a second, when the main crowd realized that their prey was trying to flee. “Daisy! Do it now!”
And she did. Or she did something as pain lanced through me, as Billy Joe snarled and threw a couple of clinging spirits off my back, as we pelted forward. And while the X-ray landscape changed all around us. A river swelled and declined, trees grew and fell, armies marched and fires raged and walls rose around us, new ones, familiar ones, like the stairs being built under our feet, lifting us along with them—
“Daisy, now!” Roger screamed as something latched on to the back of his neck. “Now! Now! Now!”
“Now what?” she asked, looking confused.
Billy Joe cursed, and jerked, a mighty heave that had me feeling like I’d left some of my bones behind—
But a second later we were tumbling into the real world—literally, because we’d just crashed through the railing on the second floor of the Pythian Court.
“Well, shit,” Rosier said, right before we hit the floor, the very hard, very marble floor of the foyer, which would have hurt more, but I’d fallen on someone.
Someone who I guessed was Roger, because he was cursing underneath me.