by E. A. Copen
I stumbled and tripped over a brick sticking up in the middle of the brick street. When I went down, I scraped my right elbow. Ow. Pain. Wait. I shouldn’t have felt pain as a disembodied spirit.
“My goodness, are you all right?”
I lifted my chin from the road and looked up into the worried features of my mother. She was a slight woman, still young enough to attract attention if she’d dressed the part, but old enough to have a patch of gray. She wore one of the three blue dresses she’d sewn by hand with a white turtleneck underneath it. The short sleeves came just above her elbow and the neckline was high enough she didn’t need the turtleneck, but mom never went out without long sleeves. She wore an unflattering white hat over her hair, which she’d wound into a tight, braided bun. It was dark out. A gentle, off-key rendition of “Old Rugged Cross” drifted out of the wooden church behind her without musical accompaniment.
It was a Sunday night service. One I remembered well. I was twelve years old.
I pushed myself up on wobbly arms and brushed dirt from my dress. It was identical to my mother’s. I wanted to tell her that I was fine, but she didn’t give me the chance. In the way only my mother could, she reached out, gripped my arm, and turned it over to see the bloody bit of road rash. “What made you fall like that?” she asked, shoving her thick eyebrows together.
“I don’t know, mamma.” I bowed my head. I knew it was the brick, but I was afraid she’d yell at me for being clumsy. I was already in the worst trouble of my life. That’s why she’d brought me to the special church service two towns over to meet one of those traveling healers. I had the devil in me and we aimed to get him out.
“Whatever became of that little girl?” Chanter mused.
Just as suddenly as before, we were standing outside of my twelve-year-old body in the street. My mother’s worry was frozen on her face. My shame and fear were etched all over me.
“She didn’t have the devil in her.” I closed my eyes, turning away from the scene. “People fear what they don’t understand. Mamma was terrified of the devil, and she thought the magick was some kind of demon after my soul.”
“But this was an important moment. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have chosen it.”
“I didn’t choose it,” I said, and then turned back to the scene with a sigh. “I didn’t want to be like her,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets. “Mamma meant well. I think I knew that even then. She was afraid of everything. She didn’t have friends. She didn’t really have faith. I don’t even think she believed in God so much as she was scared shitless of the devil. And I think this is when I knew, I knew that she was afraid of me. Maybe she was right to fear me.”
There was a lightning flash of pain in my head, a white-hot burning strike that brought me to my knees. Above my head, thunder rumbled. The wind picked up. It was a light breeze but it was still enough to nearly knock both Chanter and me over.
“We have to move on,” he said.
When I raised my head, we weren’t on the street anymore. We were in a cramped indoor space standing under the blue light of a computer screensaver. The words GO MOUNTAINEERS bounced back and forth on the screen in a three-dimensional yellow font with three exclamation marks behind it. Clothes littered the floor, some of which I recognized. In fact, I recognized the whole scene from the muffled moans coming from the bottom bunk and the stink of adolescent sweat, pot, and sex in the room.
I jumped forward in front of Chanter and spread my arms. “Hey, this is private.”
“I don’t pick the scenes,” he said with a shrug. “And your brain must think this is important for a reason.”
One of us in the memory elbowed the wall and knocked one of the thumbtacks out. A framed, signed poster of Kurt Cobain tumbled to the floor. We didn’t even notice.
I turned my head and felt an ache in my chest. “It is. But Alex is my memory and this is a private moment. I’m not comfortable giving you a play-by-play.”
“Why?” Chanter snorted. “Because you think I don’t know where werewolf babies come from?”
He leaned to the side. I leaned to block him but I was a ghost. Ghosts aren’t so good at blocking things out. “Seriously, Chanter. This is awkward. Like doing it in front of your parents.”
“I see where Hunter gets some of that annoying over-confidence. All young men think they’re God’s gift to women.”
If I’d had skin, I would have flushed crimson.
Chanter turned away and decided to walk the room. “Have you figured out what you’re supposed to be doing yet?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “That’s just fine. Took me a while to figure out my business, too. You did give him my recipe?”
“Yeah. I gave it to...” Who? Why was it so hard to think?
Thunder rattled the windows. I winced as the storm in my brain struck my skull and took us to another point in time and space.
This time, we stood in the desert with ruined buildings all around us. It was hot. That much I could decipher from the mirages of heat rippling through the air, even though I couldn’t feel the sun on my skin. The sun was brutal and bright, swollen and strangely close in the naked sky. I didn’t know this place. This wasn’t my memory.
“So, you are Judah Black.”
I whirled around at the sound of an unfamiliar woman’s voice, throwing my hands up in a defensive gesture. Chanter was gone, and in his place stood a woman I thought I knew.
Emiko was even more stunning in person. Or, I guess in spirit. She stood a height of five and a half feet, her posture a drawing out of a Victorian age girl’s book on manners. She didn’t wear a dress, but a traditional kimono, blood red in color with white birds all over. Herons or cranes, maybe. Her black hair was piled atop her head in mounds, each one decorated with little white flowers. She dipped slightly, a curtsey of sorts.
I swallowed as the faint memory of my purpose fluttered by. I had come to kill her before she could kill me.
She pushed her painted lips into a full smile. “But I am already dead.”
“Er... you can read my thoughts?”
I flinched as she flicked her wrist and extended a fan that matched her kimono. “You and I are joined now just as I’m joined to the blood of the werewolf girl.”
“Are you... eating me?”
She giggled, covering her mouth with the fan. “No, not I. Allow me to introduce myself formally. I am Emiko. Or part of her, anyway.”
“Part of her?” I tipped my head to the side.
She paced past me, touching her fingers to the side of the building. “We were called back by her need. By her... hunger.” Emiko shivered. “The dark voice called and we came. In death, we were fractured, mind, body, soul. Without me, Emiko is just a mindless beast, feeding on easy prey. There is nothing to hold us here. Not like you have.” She turned and pointed limply at my chest.
I looked down, noticing for the first time that there was a string tied around me. Three strings, actually, each as thin as embroidery floss. It was braided in colors of white, gold, and red and flowed out behind me for as far as I could see. I couldn’t see what it was attached to, but I knew it must be my body. This was the magick that Sal had worked, the small modification that would allow them to pull me back when the time came. Finally, I remembered.
But as I studied the braided strings, I noticed that the white one was frayed and thinning in places. One hard pull would snap it completely.
“So the thing that’s been attacking Mia... that’s the one you call the beast?”
Emiko conceded with a nod. “She is hunger embodied, called forth to feed and nothing more. She will eat everyone in the bloodline before she is satiated. That was how the spell was written.”
“By Seamus?”
“By the one called Finvarra. He summoned her.”
“If Seamus summoned the beast, then why are you here?”
She gave a longing sigh. “I am not. I am a memory, an echo called upon to assist you. I do not belong to you. I am his.” She touche
d the wall one more time and two tiny droplets of blood materialized, dripping down the dry wood.
Marcus, I thought. “You’re here with me because Marcus brought you. Seamus summoned hunger and Marcus summoned you.”
“I am his memory,” she corrected.
We were talking in circles and getting nowhere. Who she was and how she’d gotten into my head didn’t matter. She was on my team, and I could use all the help I could get.
“Emiko, what can you tell me about the beast? Do you know how to stop her?”
“I cannot,” she said lowering her head. “I know only that she hungers. She wants.”
Thunder echoed through the town and dark storm clouds rolled in. Emiko lifted her eyes to the sky, her expression worried. “You are dying.”
“She’s only mostly dead,” said Chanter next to me.
I jumped. “Would you quit doing that?”
“It’s not my fault you’re still lagging behind. While you’ve been here talking to her, I was doing a little recon. The thing you’re calling the beast? You’ve drawn its attention.”
As soon as Chanter finished speaking, the familiar lightning flash of pain tore through my head again. We were transported to a new time and place. This time, we materialized in tree branches several feet off the ground. I grabbed for the nearest branch, afraid I would fall and drew impatient looks from both Chanter and Emiko. That’s right. Ghosts and gravity don’t necessarily get along well.
“I’m new to this ghost thing,” I protested.
“That’s just as well,” Chanter said with a shrug. “Don’t get used to it.”
I looked out over the forest. It was dark and the familiar sound of crickets hung in the air. Somewhere close by, a bullfrog called. The pale yellow light of houses lit up a valley below. Beyond that rose a great fortress of wood, stone, and Japanese-style architecture atop a mountain. Rivers of light marched through the night sky headed steadily for the door of the fortress. Here, the beast had built its stronghold and was preparing to strike against me.
“Wait.” I looked down at the valley a second time. “This place seems familiar.”
Then it hit me. I knew where and when we were in my memories. The night I had hoped never to think of again, the one where everything changed. As the realization dawned on me, we floated closer to a tiny, two-bedroom trailer situated on the side of the hill. The porch was littered with dead plants from back when I thought I could develop a green thumb. Tomorrow was trash day. I could tell because both cans were almost full.
The back door opened and I waddled out, seven months pregnant, with a skillet full of burnt meat. Tears streamed down my face as I tried to scoop the charred bits of ground beef over the railing and into the trash while smoke billowed out of the house behind me. The phone was ringing back in the house. Alex was calling. It was the last phone call he’d ever make.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Ghosts and spirits can have panic attacks. I didn’t know that until I was a ghost having one. They aren’t quite like living panic attacks with an unbearable tightness in your chest, the waterworks, the shaking. But the crippling fear is the same. Dread overwhelmed what was left of me. The whole world quaked and I found myself gripping the air for purchase. Any strong wind that came along would have blown me away for as small and utterly helpless as I felt watching myself go back into the trailer to answer the phone.
A lump in my throat tightened, obscuring and changing my voice so that it was smaller, thinner, weaker. “I can’t do this.”
“You’ve already done it,” Chanter said, drifting closer. “You’ve already survived it.”
“I can’t watch it again.” I turned my back and tried to pull myself through the air away from the scene. No matter how hard I pushed and fought against the air, I couldn’t move.
A cool sensation passed through my shoulder along with the flash of calm sympathy. Chanter’s ghost had brushed against mine. I understood the gesture was one of support and still I recoiled, shivering and teeth chattering.
“I can’t do this,” I repeated. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” Emiko, who was still sitting in the air, tilted her head sideways and pressed her lips together.
“This is when it happens. I couldn’t stop it. It was my fault.”
Even as I spoke, the play droned on, all the actors in their places. Tires squealed at the bottom of the small hill and headlights made a frantic turn up the drive. The engine of Alex’s truck roared and groaned as he fought to get it up the steep incline and shift gears at the same time. Something went wrong—I never knew what—and the truck stalled out halfway. The parking brake creaked as he threw it on and jumped out of the truck. He didn’t close the door.
Alex was not tall. He wore his hair short and styled it back instead of swept aside as Hunter did, and let his beard grow in dark and short. It made his boyish face look harder except for when he smiled. His face was fixed in a snarl as he darted for the trailer. Alex wore glasses. They made his cheekbones seem sharper than they were and thinned his face. He didn’t have muscles, not the kind of rippling muscles visible through his shirt, anyway. He was proud of his biceps and liked to wear shirts that showed them off. Alex was a truck driver and that meant he spent a lot of time away from home. He wasn’t working that night and hadn’t come from work. He’d gone into town to drink with some friends.
Alex bolted up the stairs, jerked open the door, and stormed inside.
Just as I’d gone into my twelve-year-old body with the first memory, I snapped into my twenty-year-old, seven-months-pregnant self. I stood under the low ceiling of the kitchen, arms folded on top of my swollen belly, ready to give him hell. He stumbled when he first came in and I immediately thought he was drunk. This was all because of one of his buddies. They liked to rile me up and made a game of it. Well, I wasn’t having it.
“Alexander Charles Gale,” I said as he stumbled down the hall and then froze when he looked up at me. He was bleeding from his bottom lip and his eyes had an odd coloring. They looked lighter than normal. “What happened?” I asked, reaching for him.
Alex pushed past me, tore through the kitchen and down the hall. The closet door slammed open and he screamed, “Fuck!” at the top of his lungs. My baby kicked hard as I waddled down the hall to see what Alex was up to.
He’d pulled the suitcases down from the top shelf and was just throwing things into them. Clothes. Jewelry. Our photo album. You don’t take the photo albums if you’re planning on coming back. Bile crept up my throat as my baby kicked again, and I swallowed it back down. “What the hell’s going on, Alex?”
“They did it,” he snarled. “They fucking did it. I fucking told them this would happen. We should have taken off months ago, when the talk first started, but I thought Felix would be smarter. The fucking vampires. This is their fault!”
“Slow down,” I said, stepping into our tiny bedroom. There wasn’t much space to stand with him in there. The full-size bed took up almost three-quarters of the room. “What about the vampires? Alex, you did not get mixed up in this vampire crap. I told you, it’s all a publicity stunt. A bunch of emo kids claiming to be vampires causing a stir for attention. It’ll blow over.”
He stopped packing and slowly looked up at me. “God, you really believe that, don’t you? I love you, but sometimes you can be so stupid.”
“Don’t take it out on me.”
He stepped around the bed, taking my chin in his hands and squeezing tight, forcing me to lock eyes with him. His eyes had lightened a shade further and almost looked yellow. “It’s all real. Every last word of it.”
I pushed his hands away. “Oh, come on. Quit playing.”
“And there’s more.”
I paused to reassess. Alex liked to joke and play around, but he always did it with a smile. The straight man didn’t suit him and he knew it. Something was different.
“Werewolves are real. Fae are real. All kinds of fucking monsters are real.” He picked a belt up off
the floor and threw it into the suitcase without looking at me. “And I’m one of them.”
The sound of breaking glass and Alex’s car alarm made me jump. His head jerked up and his nostrils flared the way they only did when he was angry. There was no mistaking it now. His eyes weren’t just pale. They were golden.
“Shit. They must have followed me.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and made me look up at him again. “I don’t have time to explain everything to you, but I need you to come with me right now.”
I took a step back into the hallway. “Alex, what’s going on? You’re scaring me.” I caught a glimpse of movement outside the trailer. A dozen people had gathered around his truck armed with baseball bats, hammers, and saws. One even had a machete. They were screaming, yelling, and hacking the truck apart.
“We need to go now or we’re not going to make it!” His voice was a hoarse, inhuman growl.
Something moved under his skin. I screamed and backed away. Alex came after me, trying to grab my arm but my foot caught the edge of the sofa and I fell. He rushed to catch me but wasn’t fast enough. I fell on my butt and winced.
A brick sailed through the window right next to me. I curled up into a defensive position. Alex threw himself over me, shielding me from the rest of the rocks and debris that flew in through the shattered window. Fists pounded on the front and side doors of the trailer.
“Gale, we know you’re in there,” shouted a man’s voice. “Come out and face justice, you filthy animal.”
“Monster!” a woman screamed.
They hurled insults at him faster than they threw rocks. I devolved into a fit of sobbing. Alex tried his best to comfort me, but I panicked. “Get away from me, you freak!” I screamed and pushed him away.
Alex went limp and let me scoot away from him. I curled up against the sofa, pulling my arms and legs in as tight as I could. Fear made me flinch when he closed his eyes and rolled his head to the side. I didn’t see how bad I’d hurt him when he needed me most. I didn’t care. Terror and confusion are like that. Survival instinct had taken over, making my primary concern protecting myself and my unborn child. But I’d cut his beating heart out of his chest with my reaction. Only later would I realize what I’d done.