by Hannah Marae
“That was . . .” She paused, apparently at a loss for words. “That was amazing. You made it look so easy.”
Shrugging, Lazarus tried to brush it off. But he remembered the feeling of awe when he first witnessed his mother trap a spirit. He was just a child then. Now, the act was more of a routine, something he did because it needed doing.
“C’mon.” He ushered the mage down the stairs. “Let’s find Zeke so we can go down to the cemetery and give this woman some rest.”
They were halfway down the hall when a gunshot sounded from somewhere deep within the church.
The further into the basement Zeke went, the colder the air became. Pastor Jackson followed him as he traversed the labyrinth of shelving units and storage crates that separated them from the stairs leading to the surface. Walking past the numerous alcoves and utility closets, he felt like he was inside the depths of an ancient catacomb.
An ancient, haunted catacomb.
Something lurked down here. Zeke crept through the basement, eyes traveling sweeping arcs as he looked for signs of the spirit. The deeper he went, the more apparent those signs became. His stomach tightened as he turned a corner and found a row of broken crates, splintered wood blanketing the cement floor. With a sinking feeling, Zeke slipped on his spelled sunglasses. The sight sigil flared to life, revealing dark stains that dripped down the walls, the shadowy remains of ectoplasm.
Stopping in his tracks, Zeke palmed the channeling coin in his jacket pocket. The church was haunted, all right, but it was a situation far worse than some old lady moving flowers.
He was dealing with a goddamn poltergeist.
Zeke turned to warn Pastor Jackson. They needed to get out of here to find Lazarus and regroup. Come up with a plan before the walls came down around them. Only, when he turned to face him, Pastor Jackson was no longer there.
Stomach flopping, Zeke stepped back around the corner and looked into the gloom.
“Pastor Jackson?” He spoke barely over a whisper, but his voice still seemed to echo through the dim basement. “Sir?” Nervously, Zeke adjusted his grip on the shotgun and decided to make for the stairs.
He was halfway there when a flash of movement caught his eye. Whirling, Zeke came face-to-face with the pastor, who barreled down the path toward him with something feral glinting in his eyes.
“Aw, hell.” Zeke scrambled to raise his shotgun, but before his finger could squeeze the trigger, the pastor crashed into him. The spirit passed through his body and out the other side. Zeke staggered back, the air robbed from his lungs, heart hammering against his ribcage. With a gasp, he managed to whip around and fire a shot before dropping to his knees.
The spray of rock salt sent Pastor Jackson dissipating with a shriek. It was a momentary relief, but Zeke didn’t have long before the ghost rematerialized. A few minutes tops.
Backing against the cold concrete wall, Zeke steadied his breathing and tried to get his shit together. Absurdly, he wondered who it was that had spoken to Ignatius. As far as he knew, ghosts couldn’t operate telephones.
He had barely caught his breath when Pastor Jackson reappeared before him, much sooner than Zeke expected. “Goddamn,” he muttered with growing annoyance. “Just get this over with.”
The spirit moved on him, and Zeke held up his inked palm to intercept. But the tattoo wasn’t glowing. Shit. He’d forgotten the channeling coin. Scrambling, he fired off a shot. And missed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Zeke fumbled into his pocket for the coin.
Pastor Jackson lashed out as Zeke attempted to press the coin into his palm. Icy fingers latched onto his bare wrist, and pain inched up his forearm. His hand refused to move, as if the muscles and tendons within had frozen solid.
“Gah!” Zeke cried out as the spirit wrenched his arm, the coin falling from his paralyzed hand and tumbling into the shadows.
This was bad. Each second of connection between Zeke and the spirit was an eternity, the stinging pain spreading up his arm to his shoulder as he collapsed back to his knees. Head swimming, his throat closed up and his muscles tightened. His mind was a raging storm. His soul bubbled to the surface. Zeke’s vision blurred until the only thing he could see were those glowing blue eyes peering down at him.
And in those eyes, there was something else.
A crash sounded as someone tore down the stairs and into the basement. Pastor Jackson hissed, releasing his grip on Zeke’s arm and winking from existence. Feeling flooded back to his body. He collapsed to the floor, gasping as his vision cleared and his soul settled back into place.
From the cold basement floor, Zeke saw Lazarus come out of the shadows with Eden trailing behind. Voice croaking, he tried to warn them, raising a finger to point as Pastor Jackson flickered back into place behind Eden.
She cried out as the spirit grabbed her by the shoulders. Lazarus whirled, quickly taking stock of the situation and then moving, glowing hand snapping out to reach Pastor Jackson. The spirit disappeared with a violent flicker, and the mage dropped to the floor.
The room exploded with light. Zeke squinted as a brilliant blue chased away the shadows. An otherworldly glow bathed every surface as if someone had ignited an entire galaxy in the basement. Stars covered the ceiling, ripples of red pulsing through them like a heartbeat. Everywhere he looked, Zeke saw blue and gray slashed through with painful flashes of crimson.
Lazarus looked around, eyes wide. “What the hell . . .”
“Look out!” Zeke called, spotting the spirit sweeping through the cosmic light. He pushed to his feet as the ghost of Pastor Jackson appeared before him, crooked fingers reaching.
Lazarus crossed the room in a few long strides. He grabbed Pastor Jackson by the throat with his glowing palm, wrenching him around to face Zeke. The spirit tried to dematerialize, shrieking when the sigil bound it on Lazarus’s palm.
Gripping the struggling spirit, Lazarus gritted his teeth and forced the ghost toward Zeke, who scrambled to get his feet under him. From his pocket, he withdrew the spelled sunglasses Eden had given him, quickly putting them on. Zeke leaned in as Lazarus wrenched the spirit bare inches from his face. Pastor Jackson looked into his eyes, pulled by the mirror. He wasn’t going down without a fight.
The spirit flailed, breaking apart with an ear-piercing shriek. Then he shattered, and the jagged pieces turned to smoke that poured into Zeke’s glasses with enough force to send him staggering. With a final scream, the last of Pastor Jackson disappeared.
The cloud of light flared brightly and then went out, casting the basement once more into darkness, the mage still unconscious on the dusty floor.
It happened slowly, like rising through dark water.
The feeling of pressure eased, the water losing its grasp. Up and up, the empty void took shape as awareness sharpened. Then it was sudden, and Mab Fielding crested the waves, emerging from the depths of nothing.
The first thing she became aware of was the cold. It was the wet of the ground beneath her back, the chill in the air that entered her frozen lungs. There was also a cold inside her, a winter night filling her chest and settling around her heart.
Mab did not wake with a start. There was no desperate gasp for air, no hammering as her heart began to beat once more in her winter chest. She opened her eyes, sipped in a sigh, and gazed past a canopy of gray leaves into a black sky with far too many stars.
And she lay there on the cold ground, feeling numb and confused but also ambivalent. She wore a leather jacket and ripped jeans, the wet seeping into them and pooling against her skin. Mab knew she was freezing, but she couldn’t be bothered to care. She had a feeling it didn’t matter.
What did it matter being cold when you were pretty sure you were dead?
And as peaceful as that thought was, Mab climbed to her feet. She never was one for sitting around. Death wasn’t going to change that. She searched her pockets and found a few old receipts marked with Eden’s sigils, relics of a time gone by. Near the bottom, her fingers brushed a stray piece o
f gum in a foil wrapper. “Nice,” Mab said, peeling off the wrapper and popping the gum into her mouth.
She started walking.
Eventually—Mab couldn’t tell one way or another how long it had been—she came across a cobbled path snaking through the gray forest. It was narrow and dark, lit only by the blanket of strange stars. Squinting in both directions, she saw the path disappear into the darkness on both ends. She turned right because, well, it seemed right.
“When in doubt, always go right,” she said to herself, even though she was pretty sure that wasn’t true. It was catchy, though, and it made sense to her dead brain.
Popping her gum, Mab dug her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket and started walking. She wasn’t sure where she was going or even what she was supposed to be doing. There was no instruction manual for being dead. Though she was almost 100 percent sure this wasn’t heaven, it felt a bit tame for hell. Hell would make sense, though, wouldn’t it? She hadn’t been a bad person—not that bad, anyway, she could have been worse—but she could still see herself in hell. Maybe she always thought she’d end up here. Mages liked to dance on the line between good and evil, and it didn’t take much to fall into the dark side.
Blood magic tipped the scales.
After a time, or maybe an eternity, Mab spotted something ahead. A light in the darkness slowly moving up the path.
“Hey!” she shouted, her voice echoing despite the close press of trees. “Can someone please tell me what’s going on? If this is hell, what the fuck am I supposed to be doing?”
The light kept moving, slow and steady, like whoever held it hadn’t heard her. Rolling her eyes, Mab broke into a jog. “This is bullshit,” she panted. She knew for sure this was hell; where else would she be made to run in motorcycle boots?
Approaching the light, Mab slowed to a walk. “Hey, I’m trying to talk to you, asshole.” As the light came into focus, she thought she’d see someone carrying a flashlight or a lantern. She didn’t expect to see a goddamned ghost.
The ghost kept moving, floating down the path with its immaterial toes skimming the cobbles. Blank eyes fixed straight ahead, the spirit was utterly unaware, unblinking, unbreathing. Nothing. Mab waved her hand through its chest, hoping to get the thing’s attention. She shouted in its face and stopped on the path ahead, intending to make it veer around her, but the damn ghost just moved right through like she wasn’t there.
Frustrated, she looked to the sky and all those stars. If this was supposed to be hell, it was doing a shitty job of it.
Then it all clicked into place. All those stars. The spirit.
Not hell.
This was somewhere else.
Eden opened her eyes to see Lazarus and Zeke kneeling over her. A fog of confusion shrouded her mind, her eyelids heavy. The last thing she remembered was following Lazarus in a panicked flight down the basement stairs. Zeke was down there facing off against a second spirit. Vaguely, Eden recalled seeing him point before the pain gripped her, a cold vise around her shoulder as the world went black.
“What happened?” She sat up, groaning as something inside her skull clenched.
Lazarus put a hand on her shoulder. It felt warm to the touch like his heat was seeping into her. “Easy,” he said. “Take a minute.”
Closing her eyes, Eden let her head tilt forward. Shreds of memory slipped through her mind, flashes in the black. A dark forest. A path. Mab? It was like she had seen something when the spirit touched her: a dream or a premonition.
What happened to her?
Taking Lazarus’s hand, Eden let him haul her to her feet. She took an unsteady step back, leaning on his arm for support.
“That was weird,” she said. Already, the headache was fading, and the tightness around her eyes had vanished. Her limbs, which felt sore and achy a moment ago, seemed strong as ever. If it weren’t for the lingering images, she might have wondered if the episode happened. “Passing out is normal, right?”
“There’s nothing normal about being touched by a ghost,” Zeke said. “And there was nothing normal about what just happened. Like . . . light everywhere.” He mimicked an explosion in his hands. “Holy shit.”
“Seriously?” She looked to Lazarus for an answer. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea.” His face was tight and concerned. “I wonder if it was a reaction to your magic.”
“Try not to let it touch you next time,” Zeke added.
“Next time?” Eden retorted.
“If there is a next time,” Lazarus amended. “Wouldn’t want all that to happen again. Like I said, touching spirits is bad news.”
“Seriously. I’m still tingly.” Zeke shivered. “Now let’s get this asshole to the graveyard, huh? I’ll go grab a shovel.”
——
The graveyard was a small plot, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence in dire need of repair. Patchy brown grass was broken by mismatched headstones, some ancient and crumbling while others were painfully fresh. A simple cross decorated the pastor’s tombstone, and, at the bottom, there was a verse.
“For we walk by faith, not by sight,” Eden read as they stood around the grave. She didn’t know why, but the words made her sad. “How did he get like that?”
Beside her, Lazarus sucked in a breath. “For him to come back so strong . . . his death must have been violent. When he reached the Good Night, he couldn’t move on. I think Pastor Jackson—or what was left of him—knew he was dead.”
“He seemed so real,” Eden whispered. Unlike the spirit in the attic, the pastor’s form was complete. There was no static, no jarring movements, just an old man in need of assistance. From the very moment they arrived, they were speaking to a ghost. And none of them, not even Lazarus or Zeke, had known.
“Real enough to fool me,” Zeke muttered. Bitterness tainted his words, his tone heavy with history.
Lazarus grimaced, looking down at his cousin with what Eden thought was regret. “All of us were fooled. I think he’d been around for a long time.” He looked off into the afternoon sun. “You ready to start digging?”
While the Morgans dug up the grave, Eden sat on the ground outside the cemetery’s fence. Hades wandered over, back from wherever he’d been while they were inside the church. He huffed and dropped to the ground beside her, his front legs draped across her lap. Sitting there with her head leaned against the fence, Eden thought of Mab.
She would have killed Eden for getting into the truck with two strange men, especially men who were hunters. Four years of being careful, of trusting no one but each other, thrown out the window. Of course, that all went out the window with the fight. All Mab ever wanted was to find her sister. Florence had been missing for years, and Mab and Eden had never stopped searching. Eventually, Mab’s methods became too much for Eden to handle.
Regret sliced through her as Eden remembered the words they’d exchanged before they each walked away. Eden thought that was the end of their story, that she’d remain adrift, alone and on the run, forever. She believed the belonging she’d found was nothing more than a facade. Now, Mab was in trouble, and Eden knew, belonging or not, that she’d do anything to get her back.
Lazarus and Zeke worked fast, spurred on by the lingering threat that someone would catch them in the act, but the day was quickly passing. Afternoon was nudging into evening by the time they unearthed the coffin.
Despite her apprehension, curiosity got the best of her. Eden moved Hades aside and stood, venturing into the graveyard to stand beside Lazarus as Zeke pried open the coffin. She didn’t look inside. Instead, she watched Lazarus as he solemnly took the glasses holding the pastor’s spirit and held them above the open grave.
She was expecting another awful shriek when the pastor emerged. To hear Lazarus tell it, a ghost freeing itself from the Good Night was a horrid, arduous affair. It only made sense that Pastor Jackson would fight going back. Instead, something reminded her of a long sigh, the relief that came after exhaling a heavy burden. T
he spirit seeped from the lenses, an entity that was liquid and air and light. Lazily, it drifted over the grave and slowly descended within. Then, with a last whisper of power, the light went out, the ghost extinguished.
Without ceremony, Lazarus and Zeke set to work filling the hole.
“What about the other one?” Eden asked as they finished. It was starting to get dark, the sun chased west by the black of night. Almost a whole day was spent. The warmth of her connection signal was ever-present, a constant reminder that Mab was out there somewhere, waiting. Eden’s mind sought the tendrils of what she saw when the spirit touched her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the images were more than just a dream.
“Now that Pastor Jackson is gone, there’s no real way of knowing who she was,” Zeke replied. He wiped his brow and tossed the shovel aside, accepting the bottle of water that Eden passed over. After a long drink, he continued, “We’ll have to shatter the mirror.”
“Shatter the mirror?”
Zeke flopped to the ground, resting his elbows on his knees. “There are two ways to release a spirit.” He held up a finger. “If you know who they are, you can dig up their corpse and show it to them, like we just did with the pastor. This shows the spirit that they have indeed passed from this earth and somehow found their way back. It makes them realize they’re dead.”
“Or, in Pastor Jackson’s case, forces them to accept that fact,” Lazarus added.
“Right,” Zeke said. “This jars them into motion, sending them past Purgatory and into Heaven or Hell, whichever place they belong. For better or worse, Pastor Jackson is where he’s meant to be.” He held up another finger. “But if you can’t identify the spirit or find the body, you have to shatter the mirror. Hunters don’t like this because it doesn’t really fix the problem. It releases the spirit, all right, but it doesn’t do anything but send them back to the Good Night. They don’t move forward; they just start over. And, one day, they could be some other hunter’s problem.”