Ah. It wasn’t that we were so deep inside In Between. The dense fog and rocks were because we were nearing the lake. Or maybe it was the River Styx like Martin speculated, but I’d always envisioned the river as narrower and flowing. There were waves lapping along most of the visible shoreline, but they were directed at the rocky beach, not flowing like a river.
Nearly obscured by the fog in the distance, a half mountain butted against the water. Larger waves broke heavily against the sheer rock face.
Spook stopped, turned his head my way, but made no sound. When he crept forward again, he did so cautiously, crouching low and putting one stealthy paw down at a time. It was actually harder to make noise In Between than be quiet. I barely had feet. When you’re puffing yourself or drifting, feet don’t matter much. But Spook was a dog. He wasn’t changing his instincts just because he was dead. I followed his example, tucking myself small and advancing furtively.
When we rounded the side of the rock, Amy came into view. She knelt, staring into the water. Her hands splayed out in front of her body, forming a sort of circle as though she were holding something flat, but her hands were empty. The water swelled around the sides of her knees, while under her hands the water was strangely still.
Spook halted abruptly, his tail straight out, nose and eyes locked on the target. There was no sign of the other animals, but a flickering shadow near my feet might have been the hawk overhead. It might have been nothing more than floating gray mist, too.
I crept forward. Grabbing the ring with her bent forward like that was probably impossible, but if I pushed her in the water, maybe I could snatch it off her hand while she was floundering.
When I was nearly upon her, she spoke, “What do you mean she’s gone? She didn’t die. I’d know!”
The murmured reply was mostly lost in the lapping of the waves. “...another hospital...not my fault...”
“We can’t keep starting over,” Amy shouted. “I have to get out of here! We need that girl!”
“Who is that behind you?”
I didn’t realize in time that Amy was talking through an open portal, and the person on the other side could see me.
Amy whirled.
I kicked out hoping to stun her, but a flash of released energy from the portal pushed her sideways as the portal snapped closed. My kick missed. I slapped my jacket sleeve across her face, blinding her with a small blast of energy.
Her legs swirled, pushing her upright. At least her hands were closer to me now; they were wrapped around my neck. The edge of my jacket collar buffered me from one of her hands, but her other hand might as well have been full of vampire fangs.
Dizziness and a sudden weakness overwhelmed me.
Her grip was incredibly strong. The emotion transferred with her touch seared with a hatred worse than the rancid breath of the hellhounds.
A raccoon darted forward and attached itself to her ankle. She released me with one hand, but instead of backhanding the raccoon, she laughed. “The more the merrier, vermin.”
She grabbed it by the neck and to my horror, she absorbed it. Just like that, all that was left was the barest of sucking sounds.
I dragged myself away from her, realizing her touch had weakened me considerably. My jacket collar had completely dissolved. She hadn’t been attempting to choke me; she’d been absorbing me. My neck didn’t hurt, but it felt as though a gaping hole existed where my neck had once been.
Spook barked in the background, smarter than the ’coon. He dove in and out, daring her to come and get him. With her back against the water, he couldn’t maneuver around behind her. Neither could the fat squirrel that landed on her head. It bounced off immediately rather than risk being sucked into nothingness.
“Filth,” she screamed, her swipe barely missing it.
I lunged for the ring again, but she was fast, smacking me with her fist. She knew the trick to throwing her energy around. Maybe if I’d been willing to absorb her energy like she was attempting to steal mine it would have been a fair fight, but I wanted nothing of her essence other than the ring.
Another squirrel leaped, but fell short. It scampered up her back, claws out, digging in. She was ready for it. There was a small pop, and the critter was gone, absorbed right through her back.
“Shit.” If she touched me again, I was toast.
She advanced; I danced back. I slapped at her again with my jacket sleeve, fast. Even still, she nearly grabbed it away. The flash of energy when the sleeve snapped must have hurt her, but she forced her hand right around the spark. Her lips peeled back against the pain as she drank it in.
“Give me the ring.” It was almost a whisper from behind me.
One eye roved to locate the source. “Troy!” Boy, was I was glad to see him.
He stood not six feet away. “I come back for it every time I replenish my energy, don’t I? And you manage to talk me out of it.”
“Troy, darling, call off your beasts. We’ve been happy together!”
Her claim would have been more believable if her hand wasn’t glowing with stolen power and her face contorted with the pain of absorbing it all at once.
“They aren’t beasts,” Troy said. “They are what they were born to be. My time was up here. I made my peace and was ready to move on until you talked me out of it.” He sighed. “The ring calls me back to you every time. I didn’t realize it until Shadow pointed it out. It keeps me here. I can’t leave until I get it back. I can’t rest.”
“Okay. Sure. You can have it.” She held out her hand. “We can share it.”
“Uh, Troy...” If I tried for the ring, she’d pull her hand back. If Troy touched it or her, she’d start absorbing his energy. He’d either collapse entirely or end up so drained, we’d be lucky to make it back to the tree. The cycle would start all over.
Troy’s eyes focused on the ring. His face went slack as he reached out. Thankfully, he was too far away. I scooted in front of the ring, blocking his view. He immediately shifted to keep the goal in sight. Mindless, he drifted forward. Spook shot right through him, whining, barking, begging.
Troy flinched when the dog touched him. He stopped, momentarily confused, but then refocused on his goal.
If I could somersault over her arm and grab the ring on the way...I’d land in the lake. The lake was dangerous, but it might be the only chance we had.
Because the fog muted most sounds, we were all equally unprepared when the strumming of the song, Stairway To Heaven, floated across the water.
I wasted a millisecond scanning the black surface, but there was nothing out there. When I finally whirled sideways, I saw Kyle, the musician I’d recently escorted, perched on the outcropping of rocks that bordered the lake. “Kyle!”
He strummed his guitar, the haunting tune floating across the gray. The blankness on Troy’s face was replaced by realization for half an instant.
Amy’s hand was still beckoning him, her fingers extended. It was now or never.
“Aaaaaaawk!” The scream jarred me almost as much as the music had, and Kyle hit a wrong note, but to a man, we looked up.
The hawk dove so fast, it took precious seconds for me to realize it had slammed into Amy’s hand and either pried the ring loose or ripped her finger right off.
We all pounced towards the prize and ghost or no, I bet Troy and I earned perfect Olympic scores that rivaled the hawk’s dive.
The ring was tuned to Troy, spiraling his way in the fog even as he reached for it. His hand wrapped around the ruby.
Amy may have been closest to it, but my foot snapped energy against her knees.
She tilted over, knocked flat. Stunned from the loss of the ring, she stayed that way.
As I rolled to my feet, her wide eyes stared up at me in horror. Her hair began to fade, losing the individual strands and waves, but despite only a blobbing mass atop her facial features, her beauty remained.
Her hand clenched and unclenched, missing a finger and more importantly, missing the ring
. A strange darkness flickered around her edges like a black flame, reminding me of the blood in Espy’s IV. Was Amy part demon? Was that how she marked Troy, leaving a demon mark, but not one that Cinderspark had recognized immediately because Amy was part human too?
Kyle continued to play, while off in the distance, something joined in. Discordant violin shrieks sliced across Kyle’s music, nearly breaking his melody in half. He missed more than a note, but manfully he held the tune, and played even louder.
Amy screamed, writhing in agony.
I backed up more than one step. Kyle began sinking into the rocks.
Amy shouted, “Give it back! You wanted me to have it! It keeps me hidden from him! You saved me!”
She was suddenly crawling, stalking Troy. Flashes of dark flickered along the veins of her ghostly arms, neck, and even her face. Like the tarnished band on Troy’s finger, the elongated patches were a dark glow that surged through her bloodstream. She had been marked by something, and it had expanded much further than the small mark Troy had on his hand.
Without the ring, her real essence was no longer hidden behind stolen energy.
Troy ignored her and touched my arm briefly. “Time for me to take the next train out. I should have left right after I made my peace dirt-side. Take care of my friends for me, please? I owe them, big time.”
What was a ghost like me supposed to do with a ragged menagerie of animals? I barely understood only the most obvious chatter.
I nodded my agreement anyway. He had guided them here, and now they were repaying the favor. I was a poor substitute.
“And tell Cinderspark goodbye and thanks?”
I nodded again, but knew I wouldn’t see her again. My throat hurt, my heart hurt and there was no way for a ghost to relieve it all with tears.
Troy held up his fist, clenching his ring.
Color! I stared at the deep ruby glow, barely hearing the fading sounds as Kyle finished Stairway To Heaven.
A tiny spark drifted down, and then Troy was gone.
Chapter 16
The howling threat of the hounds gave my feet wings. I dove for the rocks, hitting the spaces and oozing in like water down a drain. The tattered ghost animals must have disappeared with Troy because the only one that was close on my heels was Spook.
Amy knelt at the water, her hands spread in an awkward circle shape. She shouted, “There isn’t time! I need to cross now! It will be temporary, I promise!”
Kyle was already tucked inside the cavity with me, his guitar returned to the case resting comfortably across his back.
There was another odd screech of distorted violin chords and then a cackling laugh from hell.
After that, there was blessed silence if you ignored the howling of the hounds.
“What was that?” Kyle demanded.
I started to explain about the ring and Troy, but midway through he interrupted, “No. I meant that violin. Can music die? Because it sounded like it was dying.”
“Oh.” I shuddered. The sound of bent strings had been like a giant spider in my ear, a gross mobbing of something I wanted to claw out. “I don’t know. That noise was here at the lake before, remember? When you first came through.”
“Not like that.”
He was right. The instrument hadn’t been that horrifying before. It had been a threat, but not a lethal promise. “How did you find us? How did you know what to do?”
He stared at me, a blank expression on his face as though he were elsewhere. After Spook nudged his hand and gave it a ghostly lick, he said, “I come here to play and watch the mermaids that look like my wife. I know they aren’t really Paula, but I’m afraid I’ll forget her.”
“Why don’t you watch your wife instead?”
He sighed. “It hurts too much. She needs to...she’s still alive. She needs to find someone else.”
I understood all too well. “Don’t we all.”
“How? How do we do it? Do I just wait like that Troy guy and disappear one day when the time is right?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Some of us seem to have a purpose, like Troy. But he did what he needed to, and apparently he would have gone sooner except that Amy had his ring. He was stuck here feeding her.” I shivered again, my form threatening to break apart from fear and disgust.
“Why is that Amy chick here? Why are you here?”
“I don’t know.” Spook put his head where my lap would have been had I bothered to form legs. I gave him a pat.
Kyle swung his guitar onto his lap, but left it in the case.
“Is there something you need to do? Here? There?” I asked.
“There were a lot of things I needed to do there,” he said bitterly. “Like raise my little girl. Play my music.”
“Martin would tell you to play, then.”
“What good does it do here?”
“I don’t know that, either. But he’d tell you that if you were supposed to play, to keep playing. That’s what he does.” Even as I said it, I realized the truth of it. “He was of the earth there, so now he’s of the earth here. He just keeps right on being Martin.”
“What about you?”
“Well, there’s a real mystery.” Since we had nothing but time to kill until the hellhounds found a more interesting scent to track, I told him what Martin had said about me not being dead. “But I don’t know if it matters. I’ve been practicing nudging the edge, but so far as I can tell, there is no way back over even though my body is in a coma in the hospital.” I frowned. “I don’t know how I ended up here either. I was running from something, something like Amy, that was trying to harvest my life force. But now almost everything I meet makes a grab for whatever is left of me. I’m not sure it’s an improvement.”
“You might go back?” He stared at me hungrily.
“No one knows. Least of all me.”
“But if you do, then you can deliver a message for me. Right?”
I’d been worried he somehow wanted to piggyback or take my place. Compared to those things his request was an easy one. “Well, sure. But, Kyle.” I held up a hand. “No one knows how to return dirt-side.”
He nodded, but instead of losing hope, he strummed his suddenly available guitar and sang, “You can’t go back home.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t even remember home, so he was more right than he knew.
Chapter 17
As soon as we were able to leave the cairn, I headed for Troy’s tree. Long before it was visible, I knew it was too late.
My throat caught, and I halted as the fog rolled forward and back. The juniper hadn’t exactly vanished, but it wasn’t there anymore either. Oh, there was a ghost of a tree, but the smooth side had completely disappeared. The remaining lump was more driftwood, a pile of jagged branches and a large trunk split down the middle. There was no hint of color, no shimmer of a connection to fairies or dirt-side. When I breathed deep, there was only the dampness of In Between, no earthy scents at all.
I drifted closer and held my hand over the ghosted wood. For the barest moment it whispered against my skin. It was a peaceful passing, one that energized and left a blossom of contentment, but sadness still struck me. The tree was dead and gone. So was Troy.
Spook woofed from behind me. Without turning I asked, “Where did the other roadkill go?”
He woofed again, a sound lacking concern.
“Well, I hope they are happy. And I hope they know how to find me or take care of themselves. I have a feeling I’m not much help otherwise.”
He yipped, and we turned for home. I should have been exhausted, but between Troy’s peaceful passing to the next part of his journey, wherever that was, and the gift from the tree, I was more rested than before the whole ordeal began. It hadn’t hurt that instead of wallowing in self-pity, I’d been kept busy answering Kyle’s questions.
Thinking about Amy sent my essence crawling. Who had she been talking to? Where had she gone?
I hoped Troy hadn’t suffered too much. Much long
er and the tree would have shut him out. And Amy would have bled him dry. She lacked the shapeless hulking black shape of most ghouls I’d seen, but maybe she was how ghouls got their start. Suck one person dry at a time. One soul here, another essence there. Then one day you’re nothing but a monster with no face of your own, nothing but an eating machine destroying and poisoning everything in your path.
The calls to the edge were frequent enough now that I almost expected them, but with everything that had just happened, I was tempted to ignore the tug that jerked at me as I passed closer to the weave.
My scalp tingled. It wasn’t a death rattle. It took me a long moment to realize the vibration was coming from the bundle the cat had given me. The waves resonated through me like a very low bass or maybe a drum beat you feel but don’t really hear.
Not sure whether to hunt down the source or not, I floated on the vibrations, letting it draw me closer. The edge responded to the beat too, because the next thing I heard was the feral snarl that only a cat could make—or a certain human with a ghost of a cat face hovering. Maybe because I had practice with Troy’s animals, or maybe because he was human and cat, I distinctly understood the snarl to say, “Your entrails are nothing but smear.”
To my intense dismay, the edge cleared on a room at the hospital again. Next time I died, I was going to breathe my last in a beautiful canyon like Martin.
My complaints fled in a near panic as I realized the cat was under attack. A large, bald man with tattoos smeared across one side of his neck lumbered towards Lynx with one club-like arm swinging blindly. The attacker was still dressed in a hospital gown, but it was torn and bloody. The bed had been slammed into the wall. Half of the leg supports, including the wheels, were smashed. One had been ripped completely off.
The cat dodged a blow, but the man never blinked. His mouth hung open as if it was too much trouble to close it. The hospital gown swung sideways with his missed blow. Where his stomach would have been, the flesh was peeled aside and hanging. Inside, there was nothing but a dried black cavity. The guy was little more than a mummy brought back into action. He certainly wasn’t alive, not with that hole.
Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4) Page 10