The Dead Seekers

by Barb Hendee

  Mari retreated a step—those whispers came from the portal. If it was always how he got rid of a ghost, then why hadn’t she heard anything the last time he’d banished one?

  Or hadn’t it happened before?

  What was in there?

  All four of the guards were panicked. Two pressed against a stall gate, their eyes wide. Jacques ducked and scrambled behind Heil and the big shell. Kreenan’s face was so pale, she’d have thought him dead on his feet, until he twisted about and looked toward the stable’s far bay doors.

  “Don’t!” Mari shouted at him. “Don’t run!”

  Heil blew again into the conch, but she wasn’t sure it had any effect now. A hollow shriek caused her to turn around.

  Tris was dragging the girl toward the swirling black portal. The small spirit began to shred like threadbare cloth. Tris’s features tightened in desperation around those pinprick glimmers of white in his eyes.

  For an instant, the sight of this made Mari’s stomach lurch.

  The boy ghost stopped in the air above. Tris turned and saw it. The portal swirled inward.

  With fear dawning on his transparent face, the boy flashed away like vapor in the air.

  He was fleeing.

  “No!” Tris cried.

  Mari followed the boy’s vapors and saw the woman ghost. Her translucent features stretched as her mouth gaped in a silent wail. Kreenan’s terror broke loose, and he charged away for the stable doors.

  “Don’t run!” Mari called again, but it was too late.

  As Kreenan bolted out into the night, Mari shot after him. If that ghost touched him, he’d die like the others, wasted away in the space of one night. Mari ran after them, and the last thing she heard over another fading peal from the shell was an anguished shout, from him.

  “Mari!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Outside the stable, Mari ran after Kreenan—or rather the woman’s ghost. She barely glimpsed Kreenan ahead as he cut right away from the barracks and toward the city wall.

  Maybe he’d thought of someplace to hide, not that this would work, not against a ghost. Then she spotted where he was headed, to the half tower with the stairs leading up to the wall’s top. He’d be trapped in there trying to get up those curving stairs.

  Kreenan glanced back just before reaching the half tower’s bottom opening. He saw the ghost coming for him, suddenly dropped, hit the ground, and rolled.

  The woman’s wisp shot over him. A trail of vapor shaped into a hand and lashed at his face. He rolled away, and the wisp curled up, roiling to turn on him.

  “Stay down!” Mari shouted at Kreenan, and she slapped the disk through the wisp.

  The metal suddenly chilled her fingers to the bone, and that glowing white mist fanned, swirled, and billowed in the night. She almost dropped the disk and quickly grabbed it with her other hand.

  Kreenan rolled to his feet, his expression flat and stunned.

  A wave of panic flooded Mari; he was numbed with terror, and she saw no reason left in his eyes. This brief assessment cost her as he rushed at her and grabbed the disk out of her hands before she could jerk it away. Stumbling backward, he looked up. The woman ghost had fully formed again. As she hovered there, a grating moan rolled out of her, and her head swiveled toward Mari.

  Mari’s mind blanked and then raced for what to do. Rush Kreenan for the disk? Turn and run? Try to shift fast enough, even with Kreenan watching and her clothes restraining her?

  Soundless now, the woman dove at her.

  Mari dropped, and rolled, and somehow wasn’t touched. When she came to her feet again, Kreenan turned and ran for the entrance of the half tower in the wall.

  The ghost didn’t even look at him. It shot downward.

  Mari dove aside, rolled again, and lunged the other way. She came up to see the woman rise out of the ground where she’d been an instant before. Mari couldn’t keep this up all night, and she circled to the right, trying to get near the wall.

  The woman rose fully out of the ground, floating a forearm’s length above it. Her face was twisted up in madness, from rage or anguish or both. She rushed in, level with the ground, and Mari didn’t know which way to go. Maybe if she waited for the last instant, the ghost might slip through the wall behind her. It might lose awareness long enough for her to run.

  The spirit suddenly lurched to a stop, as if jerked backward. Two white sparks showed through her translucent form.

  Mari knew those eyes.

  —

  Tris felt cold sinking deeper into his flesh, stripping away his strength. It was nearly as bad as the icy waters of the stream. He had never tried to banish so many spirits so quickly, one after another. He wrenched on the woman’s leg, released his grip, and lashed his arms around her torso.

  Cold sank into him—his chest, his arms—and he felt it on his face. All his body heat was draining away, but he could not let go. Not with so many lives so close—with Mari so close.

  The white woman thrashed and then screamed. The sound vibrated through him into his bones, magnifying the cold. He fought to drag her back into the clear.

  He could feel the portal already opening.

  There it was in the dark, beginning to turn and blacken, like a hole in the night.

  The woman kicked backward with her feet, driving the cold into his thighs and knees. Of the three he had fought this night, she was the strongest. She twisted on him.

  Her hand raked across his right cheekbone.

  He shoved as she tried again to claw at him.

  Her head struck the vortex and began coming apart—hair swirling, flesh and eyes shredding, until bones beneath them fractured into white dust sucked into the swirl. Her screams echoed back, fainter and fainter out of the void, and she was gone.

  Tris stood shuddering and fighting for breath as he waited for the portal to collapse. He heard Mari’s rapid footfalls coming beyond it, but the vortex still hung there before him. Something in that blackness moved the wrong way—or did not move as if it resisted the current. That null point spun in the center, held, and began to expand. A bulge protruded outward like black oil with a sheen of light upon it.

  Black Tris was coming.

  —

  Mari watched as that swirling, turning portal appeared, cutting off sight of Tris and the woman ghost. She charged wide around the portal and saw only him. The woman was gone.

  Why hadn’t that portal closed like before?

  Tris didn’t look her way and only stared, unblinking, at that turning black hole in the world. When he backstepped away from the portal, she rushed wide around its edge to see.

  Something was coming out of it.

  Out of that black darker than night around her, something bulged at its center. She wasn’t certain what, or what to do about it, and stood frozen. First an arm and a hand; then a shoulder followed. Was that a face coming next?

  All black with no detail of features, it leaned into the world, struggling to break free, but it gained no more ground and didn’t step out. Features began to form. She saw the long straight nose in its pure black profile, and then the silhouette of cropped hair on its head.

  Mari stopped breathing, not thinking anything as her eyes twitched away to him.

  Tris backed away another step.

  Everything about that pitch-black form was a mirror image of him. What was that thing? What was he?

  —

  Tris retreated another step. He wanted to close his eyes but could not and struggled to think of any way to stop this. Movement made his eyes twitch left. He felt ill and cold inside.

  Mari was here within reach of the other him.

  . . . not you . . . I Tris . . . now . . .

  “No!”

  That one word came out of him in a scream as he rushed the portal. There would be no more deaths, no
t anyone, not her, because of him. He could not allow himself to be taken. He could not allow himself to be replaced in this world. Wildly, he fumbled for the knife he had again hidden in his belt beneath the front of his pullover.

  But the portal whirled inward, sucking the other him with it, and vanished. Tris stood there, not moving, as he saw nothing before him in the night.

  “What was that?”

  He shuddered, turning his head toward that hissing voice. There stood Mari, staring where the portal had vanished. Had she seen the other him trying to come through?

  “What did you do?” she whispered.

  How could he answer her here and now or ever? He had not done anything to cause any of this except to be born . . . dead.

  No one would ever believe him. No one ever had. Even Heil was doubtful of the cause of his other self, and Tris had told him far more than anyone else.

  “It looked like you,” Mari bit off, as though the words hurt. “Was it you? Is that thing you?”

  Each question sharpened the chill inside Tris so that it spread outward on his skin.

  “That thing, that . . . you,” she whispered, inching in toward him, “slaughtered my whole family!”

  Tris was uncertain what she meant—or perhaps he did not want to be certain. She glanced again toward where the portal had vanished.

  “All in one night,” she said, “in the Wicker Woods.”

  Those last two words made Tris nearly retch, but he had not eaten anything to come up. He knew that night. Standing upon the hill, he had watched three Móndyalítko wagons roll into those trees. At thirteen, he had fled the slaughter inside that main hall, as white wisps dove through servants and guards, all dying in horror.

  His mother was still somewhere inside the manor.

  He had to lead those spirits to where no one else would go, and the dead always followed wherever he went. As he hit the front doors and shoved one wide-open, he hesitated and looked back. That was a mistake.

  Down the passage behind him, a black form walked through the hallway’s dusky shadows—but it never made a sound, not even a footfall.

  Slender, perhaps frail, the same height, with the silhouette of dangling hair like his own. It was like him. Did it stall after so many steps, like he did, so often uncertain or second-guessing where he could go to be alone?

  Unable to move, he still waited to hear even one footfall—or any noise to tell him it was someone else coming up the dim passage.

  No sound came except the screams of the dying echoing out of the far hall. And still, his mother was somewhere inside; the only person who never looked at him in fear.

  Tris turned and ran out of the manor. He remembered that black form in his childhood bedroom among the wisps of white circling around him and the other him.

  Running blindly down the main road, he looked back once and saw the form in the shape of himself pause at the road’s crest.

  Spirits roiled out into the night around the other him.

  Tris ran until a stitch in his side took away his breath. Panting, he stood in the dark, looking all ways. Where could he go that no one else would ever go? Then it came to him.

  No one ever dared the Wicker Woods anymore.

  He ran for the trees.

  Gasping again, as branches whipped at his arms and face, he stopped to look back. All he saw was the black silhouettes of trees in the night.

  The first scream rolled through the Wicker Woods.

  Another scream, then shouts, and he turned back, stumbling more than running while looking for the source of those voices. Another scream and another came and cut off too quickly.

  Tris stopped, gasping for breath. Turning back would not save anyone anymore; he could only hope those spirits might come after him. He turned and ran—and ran—until his legs gave out.

  He crashed upon the wet earth, skidding over rotting leaves and twigs. The world went dark. Nothing more disturbed him. He could barely open his eyes after dawn, too late.

  Rising took effort. Braced against the bare trunk of an ancient oak, he listened but heard little more than tree branches and leaves chittering in an early breeze. Longer still, and he stumbled back the way he had come, or so he thought. When he broke through brush into a clearing, he could go no farther.

  There were bodies everywhere. Mouths open in a last cry, eyes wide in the moment of death, they were so pale he would never have known them as Móndyalítko except for the wagons.

  Tris backed away, stumbled wide around, and never entered the clearing.

  He had saved no one. He had only brought death with him.

  —

  Tris stared at Mari, still inching toward him. Why had he never thought of that night after she had saved him when he’d left Strîbrov? He stared at her, studied her face. He had never realized it was her.

  A little girl with chocolate brown hair had sat on the lead wagon’s bench between a large man and a pretty woman in a head scarf.

  His stomach clenched again.

  “It was you,” she said.

  Too much became clear.

  . . . her hateful but doubtful glares, as if she was uncertain about something, about him.

  . . . puzzlement—no, obsession—over spirits and what he could do to them.

  . . . questions that no one else wanted or dared to ask.

  . . . and she would not leave, even if—when—he told her to do so.

  She saw that other him as him, one and the same. She was neither right nor wrong.

  “You have been hunting me,” he said, numb now.

  Not a question, for he did not need her answer, and she did not need his excuses. He had led his other self straight to her and hers.

  How many more had died in his passing after that night, or beyond the plagued village of Yan’vul or elsewhere? He had not asked to be born this way. It had happened; that was all. But wherever he went, no matter the restless dead he banished, more death had followed him.

  There was a blade in Mari’s hand.

  Long and narrow, that dagger was so much more suitable than the small eating knife tucked into his belt beneath his pullover, long enough to go straight into his heart.

  Black Tris would have no flesh in which to walk among the living.

  —

  Mari closed in, watching for him to run or do anything. He only stood there looking tired, as if he had given up. He knew about that night in the Wicker Woods, because he’d gone there, bringing that night-shadow death that was him.

  She’d seen him banish more spirits, and that black whirlpool he called every time he did so, but this time he’d tried to call back something else.

  Like him, though separate, it was still him. That was enough—wasn’t it? So why hesitate? Years of caged anguish surged up, and she felt her bones begin to shift.

  No! She wanted him to see her—her face—when he died.

  Mari charged with that hard-won dagger, finally ready to bloody it.

  —

  Tris stood motionless and emotionless. Relief would finally come.

  He understood why some spirits rose in seeking a need left unresolved, a need that would not let them rest. What if a life itself could not be resolved? What if that unresolved life cost the lives of too many others? What of the endless grief he left in his passing?

  He could not bear that any longer. And perhaps she gained a resolution for what he had done to her in ignorance.

  Black Tris would be trapped forever.

  Would he meet that other him in death? It did not matter, so long as no one else ever met it again in life.

  Tris stood still as Mari came for him.

  Something flew in from the left and struck her shoulder.

  He flinched as the conch spun upward on impact and careened off her head. She went down—stayed down.

&nbs
p; Tris hurried toward her.

  “Bad kitty,” someone growled.

  Stumbling to a stop, Tris looked for that voice.

  Heil stalked out of the dark from the stable, glaring ahead. He headed straight toward Mari. When Tris looked the other way, Mari had started to push herself up. He took two more steps to reach her first, and a fist struck the side of his face.

  Tris’s head whipped aside, the night spun, and he stumbled away as a burning sting rose in his left cheek and temple. He barely regained his feet when . . .

  “You get that damn death wish out of your head! You hear?”

  Tris straightened up, dizzy in shock, and met Heil’s angry gray eyes.

  “We’ve got enough trouble without your self-pity,” Heil snapped, and then he turned on Mari. “And you, you little stray, what’s with you?”

  Mari was on her hands and knees as her eyes fixed on Heil. They narrowed, and it seemed they were brighter, more amber than before.

  “Some bone to pick with him?” Heil went on. “You think you’re the first to blame him afterward for putting the restless dead to rest? Maybe a lover or just a relative?”

  “That is enough!” Tris shouted.

  Heil turned on him but said nothing. At a slight movement, Tris saw Mari’s glittering eyes twitch toward the dagger on the ground halfway between her and him. Heil turned back on her.

  “Really?” Heil asked her. “Are you that stupid . . . or inbred?”

  In a single movement, he reached one hand behind his back, up under his pullover, and ripped it back out. Even in the dark, Tris saw the disk in Heil’s hand.

  “Where?” Tris started. “You gave that to her.”

  Heil groaned. “You think I’d give anyone, let alone her, my only one? How stupid would that be?”

  “Then where did—”

  “I started making another the day after you showed up at my shop.”

  Tris was still too lost and unsettled. Mari’s eyes shifted again and again between him and Heil. She looked to the long, narrow blade.

  “Care for a nap?” Heil asked her. “You think ghosts are all I can affect with this?”