“Your dad went into the Light,” Wendy soothed. “He made me promise to watch over you and when he knew you were gonna be okay he just…let go. I never saw a ghost before that night; I couldn't have reaped him even if I'd known I needed to. But he didn't need it.”
Eddie nodded, released her, and the locks snapped open. Wendy fled the car and his tortured expression, welcoming the familiar burn in her gut as the heat of the Light washed through her.
It was as if her arrival opened some small riptide in the hole of the Never. Rays of Light began spilling from the storm-shot sky, brilliant shoots of blinding warmth that drew the dead and dying toward them with near mindless yearning. Wendy had to do nothing for those that could find their own way; she stepped aside and let them travel on. Soon only a handful remained, a dozen or so ghosts, huddled together and crying. A woman, pale white and flickering, hung at the far edge of the accident, wiping her hands over and over again on her white slacks. From the look of her, Wendy guessed that she had been the driver of the U-Haul. The side of her face had been ripped apart.
“A deer,” she moaned over and over again, the gaping maw that was her face flexing with her cries. “It was a deer! The streets were wet and I couldn't stop!” She grabbed one of the little ghosts and shook him. “You saw the deer, didn't you? Didn't you? It wasn't my fault!”
As Wendy approached, the woman in the white slacks backed away. “I've got to find the deer. I've got to! I'll prove it was an accident. Just wait here. You wait right there!” She turned on her heel and pushed past the little boy, hurrying over the edge of the highway and into the ditch where she quickly vanished from view. Wendy could have gone after her, but she knew that her mother would be able to capture the ghost far faster than she ever could. Her mom could get the driver; Wendy just had to find her and let her know what happened.
In this form Wendy walked the space between life and death. Paramedics were offloading bodies from the bus and the semi and the two cars at the back of the wreck but here, at the edge of the accident, she was a whisper of a being, a flickering creature made of shadow to the living and light to the dead. In the downpour and chaos of the accident, no one noticed her…except the ghosts.
“We didn't mean to,” sobbed one ponytailed girl as Wendy brushed her with the ribbons of Light, “it was an accident.”
Wendy, assuming the child meant the car wreck, kissed the girl's cheek and sent her on. There was a deep tug inside when she did so, a tidal pull like menstrual cramps, but fiercer, darker. Wendy, thinking that this was what her mother meant when she said that child-spirits were dangerous, relished the tug of pain. Her mother must be busy elsewhere, she thought to herself, sending a second child on, or perhaps she missed this group?
Each spirit sent into the Light made her weaker, set the pain in her gut a little higher until her lungs were burning and her eyes were watering. Every breath was torture. It was the worst pain she'd ever felt, the worst stitch in her side multiplied tenfold. Wendy, struggling to finish the job, sent the last of the children on and sank to the ground. Her Light flickered and dimmed, leaving her wholly human again.
At first Wendy thought she was inadvertently touching one of the corpses; perhaps a driver thrown free of the wreckage only to break their neck at the edge of the accident. But then her eyes spied the dark blue jacket of her mother's EMT uniform and the coppery wash of sodden hair. “Mom?” Wendy whispered, horrified. “MOM?”
Her mother did not answer and Wendy began to scream.
Now, seven months later, Wendy was still screaming…only now the scream was on the inside. She'd stopped reaping Shades in the days following her mother's accident. It hadn't been a conscious decision at first, merely a matter of convenience. Her father was a wreck and the twins needed someone to pick up the slack in the mothering department. Wendy had been doing most of the chores for years now so she had that part of the routine down, but she had to hide how adept she was at laundry and cooking from her father. Dad had no idea that Mom had been depending on Wendy for as long as she had.
She needn't have bothered. Now her father took Wendy's efficiency around the house for granted and only noticed when she slacked off. Sure, there was less reaping, since Wendy only took the souls that got in her way while she was on patrol, but covering the city section by section on foot was time consuming and tedious.
At first the lack of reaping had been a convenience thing, but it had stealthily grown into something more. The few times she'd tried to reap a Shade that summer, she'd failed. Her palms would grow sweaty and her vision would double; it felt like a vise had wrapped around her chest and was pushing the air out of her very pores until she backed away from the ghost and fled home. Her mother would have said she'd lost her nerve, if she'd ever had it in the first place.
Piotr's words had shaken her up, though. She couldn't stop turning the numbers over in her head. Before her mother's accident Wendy had sent (on average) three or four souls a week on to the afterlife. It was something she hardly had to think about. Do the dishes, reap a Shade, go grocery shopping. It was rote. Over the course of the five years she'd been helping her mother send souls on, she must have reaped at least a thousand souls—or more!—all by herself.
How many souls had she left in the Never over the past seven months? And with her mother gone, how many of the day-to-day souls that she'd encountered at the hospital, at accident sites, even in people's homes…how many of those were left there, weeping into the stillness of a world that didn't even know they existed anymore?
Chel and Jon went their separate ways as soon as Eddie dropped them off. Wendy waved goodbye from the front porch and drifted upstairs, hardly noticing Jon puttering in the kitchen or the lights spilling out from the shared upstairs bathroom. Chel shut the door with her hip as Wendy passed, Wendy's makeup bag clutched in her left hand and her cell phone pressed to her ear in the right.
Wendy didn't bother turning on her lights. The rumpled bed looked too comfortable to resist. Pausing only long enough to toe off her boots, Wendy crawled under her covers and hugged her pillow against her chest. Her eyes drifted closed. She dreamed.
In her dreams, Wendy walked and walked, an endless beach stretching out before her, with foamy waves licking her toes and shells crunching beneath her bare heels. A person walked beside her—sometimes her father, sometimes Eddie, but most often Piotr—and when she grew tired of walking Wendy held out her hand for her companion to grasp. The hand in hers was warm and firm, the grip strong and reassuring. Holding this hand, Wendy felt safe, secure. His hand in hers, she was afraid of nothing. Fingers intertwined, they continued walking down the beach until they reached a door in the sand.
The door was made of millions of shells sunk into the firm, hard-packed sand at their feet. No two shells were the same, though each shimmered with a radiant and subtle rainbow. When Wendy looked on the door long enough, she realized that there were words written in the reflected light. Squinting, she concentrated, but could only make out a word here, a word there. Wendy turned to ask if he could make out the words, but the hand holding hers was gone.
“Dad?” Wendy called, shading her eyes against the grey glare of the sky and twisting to squint up and down the beach, hoping to catch sight of him. “Eddie?” There was nothing, not even his footprints in the sand; the dream had erased him.
Confused, but more curious about the door than her companion's disappearance, Wendy knelt down and ran her hands over the shells, finger tracing the mystery words like a child first learning to read. For a time the door grew brighter, almost bright enough to make out the words, but then a horrible thing occurred: every place her fingers touched, the shells grew black and cold. They crumbled as she watched, horrorstruck.
The words faded, became ghosts of themselves, and a wave washed across the beach, taking the blackened shells with it. The sand underneath these holes in the shell door was black as pitch, sticky to the touch, and foul smelling—a ripe, turgid scent like old mushrooms grown in rotte
d hollows that have never seen the sun.
Wendy drew back, stared avidly at her hands. Her fingers were trembling, sure, but her hands were as they should be—ten roughened fingers tipped with ten blunt and ragged nails. Silver bangles at each wrist jangled together, and two silver rings—one at each thumb—glinted in the pale, grey morning light.
Tipping her head back, Wendy looked up at the sky. The expanse was uniformly grey as far as the eye could see. A crowd of ramshackle huts crowded the shoreline, set far enough back from the beach for safety, but only a few dozen yards from the cool expanse of sea. Gulls cried and circled overhead, but no feathers clung to their outstretched wings; they were floating, darting skeletons dancing on the breeze.
As Wendy watched, one bony gull swept wings back and dove straight down, breaking the waves with a writhing creature grasped tightly in its beak. Squinting, Wendy could make out the shape of a fish being gulped down almost whole, but it was a fish nearly out of a cartoon, all spiky bones and eyes, extended from a scaly but fleshless head.
“I'm dreaming,” Wendy said aloud, realizing it for the first time. “This is a dream.”
She pinched herself. “Wake up. Wake up, Wendy, wake up.”
Though she pinched until her wrists and arms were tender, Wendy found herself no closer to waking than before. At a loss for what to do, Wendy examined the stretch of beach on all sides. The houses were gone now, swallowed by thick white mist rolling in from the ocean. Some miles distant, probably far out at sea, Wendy heard a foghorn boom across the water and the answering call north of her position, a mournful reply that split the silence in twenty-second bursts.
As Wendy examined her surroundings the mist finally reached her and enveloped her. A faint breeze pushed the mist against her face, tickling her neck and cheek like warm, wet kisses, dragging her curls down so they hung lank against her shoulders, sodden and dripping.
“I know this place,” she said, and she did. With the mist had come the memory of a mother-daughter trip to Santa Cruz for breakfast on the beach years before, in the early months of her reaping. The sun had burned off the mist after only a few hours, but the memory of her mother sitting beside her, the cool morning air, and the world dressed in clouds, had always stayed with her. For a moment Wendy imagined that she could smell her mother's perfume. Her eyes filled with tears.
Swathed in the white and blinded by her memories, Wendy turned and turned, at first seeking some escape from these memories-within-a-dream, and then seeking even the faintest hint of a direction. The sound of the sea surrounded her, the foghorn boomed all around. The warm feelings disappeared in a rising wave of panic.
This isn't that beach. Mom is gone and I'm lost, I'm lost, she thought desperately. Wendy knew she was still at the edge of the sea—cool waves rushed around her ankles, the sand sucking greedily at her toes—but she could make out no outcropping of stern rock or figure out from which direction she'd come. I can't do this anymore.
Eyes straining against the white, Wendy believed at first that the figure floating towards her was her imagination. It bobbed in slow synchronicity with the swells around her ankles, drifting closer and closer through the mist, but it wasn't until Wendy heard the rhythmic thump of waves against a hull that she put two and two together. The figure, whoever it was, was approaching in a boat.
Glad for the company in this spooky expanse of dreamland, even if it was unexpected, Wendy stepped backward, away from the shifting shadow in the mist. The bow scraped sand and the figure, lean and lithe, leapt nimbly over the side with a little splash and guided the tiny sailboat higher onto the shore.
“Mom?” Wendy asked. The figure was slim like her mother, and about the right height. But then she spoke and the raspy voice told Wendy that this woman was not, could not, be her mother.
“A little help?” Up close, most of the figure's face was obscured by a deep, heavy hood, but the shape of her body was feminine, and she was only slightly taller than Wendy herself. The waves tugged at her cape and the shift beneath, pulling the sodden fabric toward the sea.
Wendy's heart sank. Dream or not, some small part of her had been hoping that it was her mother. Even dreaming her face was better than the pain of the real, waking world.
“Um, yeah, sure,” Wendy surprised herself by saying, and helped tug the boat free of the sucking waves, leaving them both all foam and damp from foot to knee. The act of hauling the boat in had cleared her head, however; Wendy felt calm, in control once more, and grateful to the newcomer for the distraction.
“My thanks,” the woman said. She had a knapsack slung across her chest, hanging loosely from shoulder to opposite hip, and she reached into it almost to her elbow, searching until she found a largish silver flask with a deeply tarnished edge. The woman spun off the top and drank deeply, wiping her mouth with the side of her hand when she was done. Then she offered the flask to Wendy. “Portable heat,” she said. “The wind is cold; it eats my bones.”
She was right, the seashore was icy, but accepting felt strange. “No, thank you.”
The woman shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said and began slogging through the mist and away from the ocean. Wendy followed.
Keeping the line of the boat in sight, they moved until they'd reached the tide line before the woman sank to sand and tucked her feet beneath her. Patting the space beside her, the woman did not relax until Wendy settled by her side. They were, Wendy realized, seated not far from the remains of the door in the sand. The surf rumbled, the mist eddied, and they sat in silence, listening to the fading boom of the foghorn and occasional cry of a distant gull.
“I think,” the woman said when the flask was done, “that it's time we had a talk.”
“So talk,” Wendy said, wishing that it were her mother sitting beside her. The quiet contemplation had cleared her mind until Wendy felt pleasantly light, open and airy, but lonely and very, very young. The sun was either rising or setting on the horizon, burning away some of the mist and setting the rest to glowing; infinitesimal rainbows refracted and shivered at the edge of Wendy's concentration, distracting her. “We can chat about anything you want.”
“It's best if you begin with a question. That's how these things are done, I'm told.” The woman scooped a handful of sand high in the air, tilted her hand, and let it fall in a steady stream. The sand hitting sand made a subtle swooshing noise. She brushed the crumbling beach off her hand and waited.
“Me? But this is a dream. Hello, why would I have questions? Especially from some chick I dreamed up?”
“Is it, now?” The woman wrapped one arm around her knees. “Or is this space something more?” She chuckled. “Even if this is a dream, ask anyway. Call me the genie in the lamp. The mysteries of the universe are yours for the asking.”
“Right. Okay, fine, a question, a question…” Wendy couldn't imagine anything that she'd want to ask this stranger. It was a dream, nothing more. Then she realized that there was one thing she was curious about. “Why're you wearing a hood?” Wendy demanded. “Let me see your face.”
“I don't think so,” the woman replied, tugging the hood further forward. “I had an accident when I crossed over and my face isn't—” here she laughed unexpectedly, “pretty to look on.”
“Crossed over?” Wendy snorted. “This isn't the Never. I'm only dreaming…aren't I?” The light, dizzy feeling left in a rush, leaving Wendy chill and tense and wishing her male dream companion from before could have maybe stuck around a little longer. “Aren't I?”
“‘Iam vero videtis nihil esse morti tam simile quam somnum,’” the woman replied, drawing her knees up and resting her chin upon them. “Cicero's De Senectute.” Her head inclined towards Wendy. “Roughly translated, it means, ‘Now indeed you see that there is nothing so like death than sleep.’ An apt description, wouldn't you say?”
Cold chills danced down Wendy's spine. “Do I know you?”
“No,” the woman replied. “But I most certainly know you. You are the scourge of
the Never, the one who walks at night.” She sighed. “I hear quite a lot from where I sit. Quite a lot. And not all of it, I'm sad to say, is good news.”
The woman straightened and turned so that she faced Wendy head on. All Wendy could see of her face was the bottom of her chin and long, lean line of her neck. When the woman spoke, the cloak shifted aside for a brief moment, revealing a crosshatched scar lining the edge of her collarbone, the remains of the puckered flesh dipping under the neck of her shift.
“You've been meddling in my affairs. Poking your nose where it shouldn't be.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Wendy protested. “I don't even know who you are. I'm dreaming this. I've got school—”
“Time is short here,” the woman interrupted. “Though the hours seem long. A pair of very special Walkers went missing recently, a matched set, and I can't say that I like that one bit. I've got eyes and ears everywhere—seems some folks would like to join in on my pretty party—and the whispers say that you're the one to blame for my recent troubles. Riders I can handle, they're just a gang of arrogant kiddies, but someone like you? You need to be dealt with.”
“Who the hell are you?”
The woman sighed. “They call me the White Lady.” Her fingers plucked the crosshatched scars like a harpist strumming strings and her voice dropped low, insinuating. “Heard of me?”
Cursing, Wendy shoved away from the woman and leapt to her feet. She tried to unravel the Light but the fire was dead inside, black coals and dust. She could not even find the smallest flame to fan into a blaze. Wendy pounded her fists on her thighs. “Why won't it come?”
Amused at Wendy's display, the White Lady shook her head, hood swaying from side to side, and tsked. “Dreams may be like death, my dear, but they are still ages apart. Do you really think I'm so stupid as to approach you in the Never?” She sighed again, as if disappointed. “You've just proven that you can't be trusted; you'd reap me then and there, if I were to call for a palaver.”
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