Troy raised one hand halfheartedly and began to drift away.
“Troy, you can’t tackle this by yourself!”
Spook came around the tree then, barking. He was having none of Troy’s nonsense. He took his spot, trailing after Troy, leaving me standing next to a juniper that wasn’t mine and with worry that had nowhere else to go.
Chapter 8
I floated slowly towards home, searching for Martin. He was the only one I knew who might have a clue about demon marks. He seemed to take great pride in knowledge of obscure facts. Either that or he just enjoyed babbling nonsense while pretending to be erudite.
As the gray drifted around me, I felt a tug to the edge. From the beckoning light, I knew it wasn’t a death. There was still a whisper of a gentle life breeze, the brush more like the magic of Troy’s tree than the opening of the weave to let in a soul.
It rarely paid to be curious In Between. But energy was energy and who really knew all the reasons a link to the other side might exist? Truth was, I was a moth to a flame where the living side was concerned even though other, more dangerous things were attracted there as well.
Before I could puff myself closer, a darker gray on gray froze me on the spot. Ghouls lacked the red eyes of demons and hellhounds. Once you were too close, there was nothing but a sucking blackness that would absorb you before you could escape.
I guardedly watched the shape as I paddled away in the opposite direction as fast as my blob could bobble. If weapons had been available here, I’d happily float around in full Rambo gear. Too bad shotguns never came through. Then again, there were far more dangerous creatures here than myself. With my luck they’d control all the guns. But even something simple would be better than nothing. My hands clenched as though with the memory of holding a weapon of some sort, but it was the ghost of a ghost, an instinct more than a recollection.
The blotch of gray didn’t follow me, but the moan of misery did. Ah, a spirit then. Other than coating me with sadness, it couldn’t actually do any harm. Martin said the spirits were very old ghosts who had never moved on, either because they hadn’t made their peace or they had gone bad. They tried to take over other ghosts, but had no power to do so.
I had no idea what he meant about going bad. Did ghosts spoil like meat left sitting out? Did we go rancid if left in the gray too long?
The dark shadow drifted away from the tug; the call from dirt-side wasn’t a death so the spirit couldn’t wallow. It fed on misery the way most of us ghosts subsisted on discarded life energy.
I resumed hunting the pull along the edge. The scent of life was easy to follow once you were in the current because the edge accommodated, shifting.
The walls that came into focus were the same blank concrete as the other hospital rooms, but there was no patient this time. The dead guy caught my attention first because his energy was similar to my own, borrowed; not that of a living soul. He was in blue nursing scrubs, standing across the room from Martin’s two friends. Roberto was the short Hispanic guy who had talked to us and given Martin the bloodstone. The other guy had to be Lynx because the ghostly image of a cat with long tufted ears hovered around his face. While his eyes shifted between the yellow glow of a cat and those of a human, both were filled with the spark of life.
“Martin says the girl doesn’t belong there. We need to find her body here and call her back. I thought you could cross because you’re already dead. You could ask her questions to help us locate her on this side,” the cat said. “Why wouldn’t it work?”
The dead man in nursing smocks had a ghostly image of his own. The image around him was a humanoid shape, but leathery as though mummified. The human form had hair neatly tied into a ponytail. In the ghost image, his head was rippled black skin with short, shiny hair so tight across a bony skull, it was nearly invisible. His bat ears were enormous, and I couldn’t tell if the wings across his back went with the human form or the other creature because they seemed to belong to both. Part of one wing was missing, and the human was minus most of one arm.
“There is no way I can cross.” The dead man’s voice was elegant but clipped, matching his cold black stare. Since he was dead, he could probably cross easily. Of course, once he was In Between, I doubted he could find his way back over to the side of the living. Even with the gentle winds crossing the open weave right now, the weave encouraged me to stay away. It wasn’t yet painful, but the pressure was a headache building across every part of me.
Roberto’s voice was the easiest to understand. Like the cat, his hair was black or close to it, but his was longer, instead of a buzz cut. The thick part on top stood nearly straight up from the breezes crossing into the weave. “What’s your name?” he asked me. Unlike the others, his pleasant tenor came right through to In Between as if he were standing in both places at once. He was easily able to see me, just like when Martin had spoken to him.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Everyone calls me Shadow.”
“Roberto,” he introduced himself. “That’s Lynx and Patrick.” He pointed to the cat and then the dead guy.
“Patrick can cross, but once here, I doubt he could cross back,” I told Roberto.
There might have been a flicker of surprise in the dead guy’s eyes. He gave me a nod of either welcome or acknowledgment. “Is that so?”
The cat half hissed, but sounded more excited than angry. “When Roberto does his thing, it’s as if there is a window. She found us!”
I had been drawn here, much like other places in the hospital. “Why are you looking for me?”
“We saw you with Martin when you helped tear him away from Roberto. Saved both their asses, if you ask me. Martin said we need to locate you on this side. Patrick is a vamp so we figured since he was dead, he could cross and ask you questions without it killing him.” A Cheshire grin stretched across both the ghost cat and the human. While there was no sound of laughter, there might have been a ghostly purr.
My attention flicked to Patrick. I hadn’t believed in vampires when I was alive. Now, it wasn’t even a slight stretch. “A vampire? You use the energy from blood as your own life energy source.”
“That’s what I said,” the cat agreed. “He’s a vamp.” His human eyes flashed yellow again.
I wanted to reach out and touch that energy. It sparked like fresh green leaves, like the earth energy Martin had brought back the last time he had talked to them. Lynx was beautiful, his face full of shifting shadows; even the human side of him seemed to dance in the low light, drifting between rays so that he was somehow partly camouflaged. His glowing eyes matched the taut energy bundled inside his body.
I had never possessed that much life energy even when alive.
“Do you know where you lived? The names of any relatives? How long have you been stuck where you are now?” Roberto shot questions out quickly, and I realized he was tiring. The weave drew closer, but the pressure level wasn’t any worse. The dangerous edges would remain that way, hovering, until it snapped closed. If it happened suddenly enough, the steel fabric would shatter me into so many pieces I’d never recover.
I slid away, ever so carefully. A wisp of my arm brushed against a greedy edge of weave and the pain rocked me dangerously close to a different part of the grasping bands. “I don’t know the answers to any of that. And time is not the same here.” My voice squeaked with pain.
“Go! Hurry,” Roberto yelled.
The cat tossed something at me. Instinctively, I reached for it, although, of course, it could not cross the barrier. Except it did.
“How we gonna find out who she is if she doesn’t know herself?” the cat wondered, all trace of happy purr gone.
“That’s not a problem.” The vamp’s voice was fading, but his words were still clear. “I don’t know who she is, but I do know where she is.”
The weave slammed shut, slapping me backwards like a piece of gray litter tumbling onto the landscape. My hand clutched the bundle of woven weeds and fur. I wasn’t g
oing to lose it, no matter what.
Chapter 9
If I could have held near the edge, I would have stayed, pain and impending doom notwithstanding. The vamp knew where I was? Why did he know and I didn’t? A second or two longer, and he might have told me. Not that it would have mattered. I couldn’t go there. But if a vampire knew where my body was, did that mean I was a vampire somewhere on the side of the living?
No. I was here. The vamp existed on the side of the living. He must imbibe from the living to be able to remain there. He was dead. I was dead, but I was In Between. Sucking nutrients from pine needles and shafts of light that leaked into In Between didn’t make me a vampire.
There were ghouls that ate the living or the dead; anything for souls or bits of life. They were like the hellhounds, but faster. Shoot, most everything except the roadkill and a few human souls ate everything and anything In Between. The mermaids weren’t the types you invited over for coffee or tea. Not that I’d actually witnessed them eat anyone, but those teeth weren’t for gnawing down trees like a beaver.
I frowned, holding my arm where it had been slashed by the weave. My essence was leaking, and I was drained again, but the packet the cat had thrown me was full of energy. How had it made it across? Why had he thrown it, anyway?
The braid smelled of him, of earth, of magic. Before In Between, I hadn’t known about magic, but now having met Cinderspark and the others, there was no doubt it existed. This braid was plant energy, human energy and a unique spark. I breathed it in again. Clean. Earthy. Electric. There was a small pebble woven through its silky length. A hole in the center of the bead allowed the braid to run through it. One darker gray spot had dripped across the pebble, and I wondered if it was the same earth Martin had requested—a bloodstone.
I carefully disguised the braid from the cat by weaving it into my hair. It was a barely noticeable dark gray spot against the lighter gray.
Thinking of Martin made me all the more determined to find him. Unfortunately, thinking of him didn’t make him appear, but it provided a distraction that might keep me from brooding about my own death. The how and why didn’t matter anyway because there was nothing to be done about it. But the cat didn’t seem to agree with that sentiment.
It was stupid to hope. I didn’t even remember enough details to help. There had been an attack, and then a bright light that shattered me in every direction. I had refused to go towards a light because I knew what that meant, and when something tried to pull from me, I instinctively fought back.
Something or someone had demanded the light inside me, but I had refused to give it up. There wasn’t much else to the memory other than a fear that left me mindlessly screaming until I ran, stuffing the light into a place that was opposite the direction of the pull.
And then in that instant, it was too late. I was here and not ready to be dead.
I turned and smacked right into Martin.
“Eeeeep!” Quiet as a ghost, he had snuck up on me. The shock of bouncing off him nearly sent me straight back into the weave.
I glared at him to no avail. He merely drifted to the right and began crooning over a pile of gray. Nothing unusual there; the man was always singing at something.
Rather than wait for him to cease his yodeling, I told him I’d seen Roberto and Lynx again. I left out the part about Lynx throwing me the braid. Even though Martin had said the bloodstone was for me back when Roberto had handed it to him, Martin had never passed the gift to me. Not that I had any idea what to do with it. Such a powerful object from the land of the living would only make me a target of every hungry beast In Between.
Martin sang around my words, but he was listening. When I stopped talking, he puffed himself up with air for no apparent reason.
“That cat is a good cat, curious and smart. Now that they found you, maybe he and the witch can call you back.”
“You really think I’m still alive?”
Martin let all the air out of his essence, but released it carefully so he didn’t swish away. “There are many stages to death, and you’ve always been different from the rest of us here. Your voice isn’t hollow, and you trail phantom juice behind you that reaches for the other side when you aren’t paying attention to it.”
“I do?”
“You’re more contained now that you have practice, but you have a ghost.”
“I am a ghost!” I left off the ‘you idiot,’ but it was a near thing.
He nodded and hummed. “But you have this double impression. It took me a while to figure it out, but whenever you are near the edge, your mirror image hops right over like it belongs there.”
This was news to me, although, admittedly, I was constantly having to collect myself. Bits and pieces were frequently sliced and diced off me or melting away on what seemed like an hourly basis.
“If I’m still alive, how do I find myself? And how the hell do I go where I want to be? If my body exists, I’d rather peer through at it instead of random hospital rooms!” One other question burned inside me, but the answer might be too frightening to face. And who am I?
“Stop fighting the weave. It is just a form of energy, doing what it is meant to do. Use your own energy to coax the weave along. Of course, if you aren’t careful you’ll break apart, but you can nudge the edge along in front of you if you are careful. It doesn’t like us so it will skitter out of the way for us, but yet it must contain us. You can’t fight it. Sing to it.”
“Martin.” I started to tell him that not everyone wanted to float around crooning like an insane madman, but he chuckled, turning it into an all-out cackle before he regained control of himself.
“Not lucky enough to have a beautiful voice like me? Heh-heh.” He wafted away, beckoning. “It’s not the voice that has to sing. It’s the energy.”
He was headed back to the edge. I hesitated, but Martin would merely wander away if I didn’t follow. Nervously I puffed myself after him. “The last time I visited the edge with you...Is it required to be naked to coerce the weave into doing what you want?”
Martin nearly blew himself halfway across In Between. His laugh started as a ghostly shout and dissolved into chuckles that pushed him around in a circle of fits and starts. “Heh-heh. Oh, heheheehee. No, but my nakedness irks the witch. Adriel is an amazing power, but she could stand to unbend some.” Martin cackled some more.
“Good thing because I don’t even know how to get naked,” I muttered.
That set him off again.
When he could finally speak, he said, “I dress myself with bits of this and that, same as when I was topside. This place isn’t earth, but it has a voice. If you listen, you can gentle it and bend it where you might want. Same as earth.”
I wasn’t certain of that. But at least any follow-up ordeal wouldn’t require me to stand naked in front of the cat and his friends. And most of the time Martin didn’t bother to fully form himself, which was fine. His granite face was more than enough.
As we sidled back to the edge, he asked me to list all the rooms and people I’d seen. Predictably, those memories brought us near the hospital. Reminiscent of walking through a graveyard, only the opposite, I could see blurred images of the living walking the corridors. There were at least two nurses, a doctor in a lab coat, and a gaggle of visitors whispering. The group nearly ran over the cleaning lady when she stepped around the linen cart to hand an orderly a set of clean sheets.
“Oh, hey Julia,” the guy acknowledged her, glancing up from his phone. His name tag read “Paul” in big black letters. “Since you haven’t filled the linen closet just yet, can you also drop a set of those in room 202 on your way by?” Without waiting for an answer, Paul smashed the clean sheets in the crook of his elbow and ducked into the doorway next to the one with the visitors.
The patient in that room was facing the wall, but turned with a groan when Paul walked in. Something about the man’s bald head sparked a memory, but Martin distracted me when he sang, “Well, lookee there.”
/> I drifted his way to find him in front of a chilled storage area containing rows of bagged blood. If blood spatters on a sheet could attract a demon, I certainly didn’t intend to frequent a blood bank on a regular basis. There were bags of the stuff just waiting for a demon—or a vamp. My mouth dropped open.
A female vampire, dead as could be, picked up two of the bags, scanning one of them with a handheld device. She was dressed in a purple nurse’s smock, but it fit her curves well, making her somehow very elegant, even in death. Her hair was smoothed into a French twist, and like Patrick, a bat-like visage hovered behind her.
Just how many vampires were walking around dirt-side, anyway?
I backed off until the fog rolled in and obscured every single bit of the other side.
“Odd, those vampires,” Martin said. “Did you notice the aura of death?”
“Their lifelines are gone. Patrick was like that too. Dead, but the glow of life radiates through them from borrowed energy.”
He tapped one finger on his nose. “It’s not easy to meditate here with all these distractions. You can’t learn if you are busy watching people and wishing you were there. Come along, and I’ll teach you elsewhere.”
We drifted peacefully for a while before Martin coaxed the weave to reveal an empty canyon. The location didn’t surprise me. “Did you die here?”
He hummed. “I came here from there.”
“That sounds like a yes.” He might choose to Mickey Mouse around with the idea of death, but I wasn’t inclined to float around fooling myself. Maybe there was a part of me left alive over there, but for now, I was as good as dead and just as hampered.
“It’s easier for me in this spot,” he agreed. “Feel the wind.”
Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4) Page 6